HE latest

Open consultation: Adult further education: measuring success - detailed proposals

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 12:00:00 +0000

This consultation sets out detailed proposals for using new outcome based measures of performance for publicly funded post-19 education and skills, excluding higher education. It builds on the findings of our earlier consultation published in August 2014.

The consultation looks at:

using the measures for accountability and intervention as part of the minimum standards framework
how local enterprise partnerships ( LEPs ) and local authorities can use the new measures as part of local outcome agreements with providers
how we might best present and publish the measures to help learners, employers, LEPs and providers

A new set of experimental data on these measures is published alongside this consultation.

Press release: New appointments to Innovate UK board

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 15:01:54 +0000

Business Secretary Sajid Javid has today (23 September 2015) appointed 2 new members to the governing board of Innovate UK, the UK government’s innovation agency.

Tim Edwards, an entrepreneur in the biotechnology and charitable sectors and John Latham, Vice Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer of Coventry University have been appointed for a 3 year term on the board.

The Business Secretary also reappointed Hazel Moore to Innovate UK’s board to serve a second 3 year term.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said:

We want to make the UK the best place in the world to innovate and grow a business. Innovate UK has helped more than 5,000 companies to grow and create jobs. As board members John Latham and Tim Edwards will bring a great deal of valuable experience to the important role driving the science and technology innovations that will grow the UK economy.

Chairman of Innovate UK and Chief Executive of Cisco UK and Ireland Phil Smith said:

I am delighted to welcome John and Tim to the board of Innovate UK. John’s understanding of the need to bridge the gap from research to commercialisation as well as Tim’s experience as an entrepreneur in a highly innovative sector will help ensure Innovate UK maintains its focus on its core role of supporting high potential UK firms.

I am also very pleased that Hazel has been reappointed to serve another 3 years on the board. Her experience in advising innovative tech companies has been invaluable to Innovate UK and her knowledge of the North West will be very useful as we look to take a more regional approach to our work.

Notes to editors

Innovate UK is the UK’s innovation agency. Its goal is to accelerate economic growth by stimulating and supporting business-led innovation. Sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills ( BIS ), Innovate UK brings together business, research and the public sector, supporting and accelerating the development of innovative products and services to meet market needs, tackle major societal challenges and help build the future economy.
These appointments have been made in accordance with the requirements of the Code of the Commissioner for Public Appointments. The appointments are made on merit and political activity plays no part in the selection process. John Latham and Tim Edwards have declared that they have not undertaken any political activity in the last 5 years.
Board members of Innovate UK receive remuneration of £9,180 per year.

Biographies

John Latham

Professor John Latham’s career of over 30 years has focused on digital technologies, innovation, knowledge transfer/exploitation and supporting SMEs . As Vice-Chancellor and CEO of the Coventry University Group, he is responsible for the overall academic leadership of the operations of the university and its related group of subsidiaries. He also holds an academic appointment as Extraordinary Professor of Stellenbosch University in the field of innovation and enterprise development.

John is a Member of the Higher Education Funding Council for England ( HEFCE ) Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee and also of the Universities UK Innovation and Growth Policy Network which have national roles in economic developments related to research, innovation and growth in UK universities. He is also a Design Council Advisory Board Member and an Advisory Network Member for the Connected Digital Economy Catapult ( CDEC ). Additionally John has been a Non-Executive Board Member of the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership Ltd since 2010, chairing the European Structural Funds Committee.

Tim Edwards

Tim Edwards is an entrepreneur working in the biotechnology and charitable sectors. He is Executive Chairman of Atopix Therapeutics Limited, based in Oxford – a biopharmaceutical company developing a novel class of oral CRTH2 antagonists to treat atopic dermatitis and severe asthma. He is also a Non-Executive Director of the Cell Therapy Catapult and Chairman of Governors of Magdalen College School in Oxford – a day school for pupils aged 7 to 18 years old with a co-educational sixth form.

Tim was previously President and Chief Executive Officer of Cellzome Inc, a US-owned drug discovery company with a chemoproteomics technology platform which was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in 2012. He is also a past Chairman of the UK BioIndustry Association and member of the Department of Health Ministerial Industry Strategy Group.

Hazel Moore

Hazel Moore is Chairman of FirstCapital, a technology-specialist investment bank which she co-founded in 1999. Her experience spans advising technology companies on mergers and acquisitions, private equity and venture capital, as well as advising family offices, institutional and strategic investors on investments and portfolio strategies.

Hazel was formerly on the Investment Advisory Panel for the North West Fund – a £140 million evergreen investment fund focused on small and medium sized enterprises in the North West of England. She began her career with GEC Marconi and has an MA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University. She is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

Press release: Science Minister hails Wales’ role in 'innovation nation' as the 5 millionth Raspberry Pi rolls off South Wales production line

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 12:25:51 +0000

iconic Raspberry Pi mini-computer reaches the 5 million milestone at Bridgend factory
£2.6 million project by Airbus Group, Cardiff University and partners to research protecting aircraft from lightning strikes
UK cities invited to bid into £2 million research fund to become healthier, more prosperous and more sustainable

Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson today (23 September 2015) hailed Wales’ role as part of the ‘innovation nation’ as he visited Raspberry Pi’s production facility at the Sony Technology Centre in Bridgend and unveiled a total of £4.6 million in funding to help fund potentially life-changing research in to the future of cities and modern aircraft.

During a visit to Cardiff University, Jo Johnson announced a £2.6 million project led by Cardiff University and Airbus to help protect aircraft from lightning. Increasing the use of new and advanced materials such as carbon fibre composites in aircraft structures means the aerospace industry needs to fully research their behaviour under extreme conditions. The research will be undertaken in collaboration with the university’s Morgan-Botti Lightning Laboratory.

Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson said:

As a one nation government we are backing science and innovation across the UK. We want to be the best place in Europe to innovate which is why we are investing in Cardiff University’s unique project to create new ideas for developing Wales’ world-class aerospace sector.

Today I have seen first-hand the exciting technologies being developed at Cardiff University and at Raspberry Pi in Bridgend. This is the kind of expertise we are supporting to safeguard the future success of our economy.

Ian Risk, Head of Airbus Group Innovations UK, said:

This is a key project for the aerospace industry, allowing us to enhance our fundamental understanding of what occurs during a lightning strike on a composite aircraft structure. This funding will be used to improve our understanding of what occurs physically and chemically when a plane is struck by lightning to continually improve the design to be more efficient and economical.

Professor Colin Riordan, Vice-Chancellor, Cardiff University, said:

Universities exist to create and share knowledge and the impact of that on UK society is huge. The research conducted in our Lightning Laboratory is just one example, among many, demonstrating how fundamental research supported by the Research Councils is developed into translational research of real value to the UK through partnership with industry, government and Innovate UK. We are really proud of our long record of industrial collaboration across a wide range of sectors.

The minister also used his visit to encourage Cardiff and other UK cities to bid for a share of the £2 million Urban Living Partnership, which will harness research and innovation expertise to make cities healthier, more prosperous and sustainable places to live.

Up to 5 individual pilot city projects, each led by a consortium of researchers, local authorities, service providers and businesses, will use their diverse experience and expertise to identify, understand and address interconnected challenges ranging from community health and crime to social inclusion and employment.

Mr Johnson also witnessed the production of the 5 millionth Raspberry Pi computer at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Bridgend, as the iconic credit card-sized computer reaches its latest milestone. The mini-computer was developed in the UK to inspire children and adults of all ages to learn about computing and since Sony UKTEC began working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2012, 70 jobs have been created in the Bridgend area with an additional 30 opening by the end of the year.

The visit comes a week after the UK was ranked second in the world in the Global Innovation Index - higher than all its G7 counterparts.

Notes to Editors

In 2013 to 2014, UK government expenditure on research and innovation in Wales by Research Councils, Innovate UK and Higher Education Research Capital, totalled nearly £80 million.
The Airbus and Cardiff University-led project, the protection of structures from lightning strike, is a £2.6 million project (£1.7 million UK government grant) which is receiving funding from the £2.1 billion joint government and industry commitment for aerospace R&D . The project, supported by the Aerospace Technology Institute ( ATI ) and delivered with Innovate UK, will include the development of new test methods and diagnostic equipment to determine what occurs physically and chemically to produce models of these events. The initial test programme has proved successful and has led to a first patent submission from the consortium. Other partners in addition to Airbus and Cardiff University include Hexcel and the National Composites Centre.
The ATI was created by government and industry to guide investment into research and technology projects that will sustain and enhance the UK’s competitive advantage. Its technology strategy, launched in July 2015, defines the best combination of capabilities, technologies and products to advance next-generation civil aircraft; enabling industry to exploit anticipated global growth, and deliver value to the UK economy through the sector’s high productivity and skills.
The Morgan-Botti Lightning Laboratory ( MBLL ), based in Cardiff University’s School of Engineering, provides a research and test capability for understanding and enhancing the science of lightning protection. The £2.4 million facility is Europe’s only university-based lightning laboratory and is capable of generating controlled lightning with currents up to 200,000 amps, more than 5 times that of an average lightning strike.
The Urban Living Partnership is the first time all 7 UK Research Councils and Innovate UK have come together to address the complex challenges and opportunities of urban living. Bids to the partnership should be led by universities working in partnership with cities and other bodies. Applications should be submitted through the Research Councils’ Joint Electronic Submissions system.

Press release: Bogus training courses come under fire

Sat, 19 Sep 2015 23:15:07 +0000

students offered fake apprenticeships – later to find out they are unqualified
government crackdown on dodgy providers and bogus training courses
businesses and training providers support government crackdown

A family firm of electricians in Milton Keynes and the building company Balfour Beatty told a government consultation they found students being lured into apprenticeships which offered low-level training. At the end of the training programme the students were severely underqualified and were not in a real job.

The cases came to light as the government introduces new powers to prosecute training providers misusing the term ‘apprenticeship’. In the future, anyone offering fake or low-quality apprenticeships training could face the possibility of a fine and prosecution in a Magistrates Court. The government is committed to giving apprenticeships similar legal protection as university degrees.

Skills Minister Nick Boles said:

Everyone knows what a university degree means. It’s an official title. Young people doing apprenticeships should get the same level of distinction.

I’m supporting working people by defining the word ‘apprenticeship’ in law. This will ensure people get the best training and opportunities.

Balfour Beatty, who currently recruits approximately 150 apprentices a year, welcomed the protection.

Leo Quinn, Balfour Beatty Group Chief Executive said:

Protecting and enhancing apprenticeships as proposed by the government’s Enterprise Bill will further build the status of apprenticeships and help to encourage business to invest in them.

Our industry needs talent and skills, therefore it is crucial that apprenticeships remain world-class so that we can continue to attract the best and brightest individuals.

SJD Electrical, a family-run business in Milton Keynes, also welcomed the proposals, highlighting the negative impact of low-quality training courses.

Ruth Devine, Director at SJD Electrical said:

Protecting the term ‘apprenticeship’ will help us attract the most able individuals and offer a guarantee to apprentices that they will receive world-class training.

A number of applicants applying for jobs at SJD who thought they had completed apprenticeships, were surprised to find that they were not fully qualified. Low quality training courses contribute to the many instances of poor workmanship we come across.

Apprenticeships have proven crucial to provide businesses with the talent and skills they need to grow and the government is committed to supporting 3 million new apprenticeships by 2020.

Notes to editors:

The government ran a consultation on protecting the term ‘apprenticeship’ from 29 July 2015 to 19 August 2015. The consultation was sent to over 500 key stakeholders and was put on the gov.uk and Citizen Space websites.
Over 90 responses were received from a wide variety of interested parties including employers, private training providers, colleges, schools, universities, apprentices and representative groups.
The government response to the consultation will be published on Monday 21 September 2015.
Examples of the apprenticeship term being misused include:
- students thinking they had completed an apprenticeship but actually had only taken a low-level technical qualification
- students having to find other employers to continue to achieve the qualifications required to complete a full apprenticeship
- employers finding students entering the industry only part-qualified and without adequate learning, work-based experience and practical skills
Measures to protect the term ‘apprenticeship’ are contained in the Enterprise Bill. The Enterprise Bill was introduced to the House of Lords on 16 September 2015.
The measures do not affect companies who offer their own high-quality internal apprenticeship scheme.

Press release: UK-China education partnership reaches new heights

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 16:39:48 +0000

Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson and China’s Minister of Education Yuan Guiren signed an ambitious framework agreement on education collaboration at the third UK/China People to People Dialogue in London today (17 September).

A total of 23 education agreements were signed at the 8th UK-China Education Summit, part of the People to People dialogue, which will see UK universities and organisations working closely with partners in China to boost joint academic research and student exchange, and to establish new institutions.

Culminating in the signing of a ‘UK-China Strategic Framework in Education’ both countries announced their commitment to expanding collaboration across higher, vocational and school education, and to work closely together in sports education.

Minister for Universities and Science Jo Johnson said:

Our relationship with China is entering a new phase of scientific and educational collaboration on an unprecedented scale. Our agreement will bring researchers together to address global challenges, change the lives of young people through better access to sports, and build partnerships across school, vocational and higher education to provide students in both countries with the right skills to become the leaders of the future.

Ministers from both countries witnessed signings that will see the UK working with China in the development of its sports education, with a focus on football. A joint football accreditation system will be developed, opening doors for Chinese football coaches to be trained in the UK, feeding into a national drive by the Chinese government to grow its sports sector.

Agreements were also signed to increase exchanges among researchers in the UK and China and to build their skills to enable further collaborations.

In addition, links will be created between 200 schools in the UK and China to organise exchange visits and work together on policy and curriculum development, in an effort to improve the provision of high-quality basic education in both countries. Science, technology, engineering and maths ( STEM ), language, sports, arts and other creative subjects will be a major focus of this collaboration.

Schools Minister Nick Gibb said:

Education collaboration between the UK and China is vital if we are to learn from each other’s successes and to help us use international evidence of best practice to drive up academic standards in our schools.

The innovative maths teacher exchange is already improving maths teaching in England’s primary schools, but there is still much more both countries can learn from one another.

These new partnerships will allow us to share as well as helping to develop important language skills to secure stronger links in the future.

Notes to editors

UK-China Strategic Framework in Education

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and China’s Ministry of Education signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the ‘UK-China Strategic Framework in Education’, formalising both countries’ commitment to working together in the 6 key areas of higher education, vocational education, schools, language, sports, and mobility.

Speech: Launch of the 2015 Global Innovation Index

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 16:36:18 +0000

Good morning, everyone. It is a pleasure to welcome you to London and to the 2015 Global Innovation Index launch. The UK is a nation proud of its innovators, of Sir Isaac Newton, of Crick of DNA fame, of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Less famous in this context is Margaret Thatcher but in her chemical days she invented what we now know as Mr Whippy ice cream!

It is a pleasure therefore to have the opportunity to host the World Intellectual Property Organization, INSEAD Business School and Cornell University as they launch the 2015 Global Innovation Index. And I’m delighted to see so many of you here with a keen interest in this important publication. This is only the 8th edition of the Global Innovation Index, but it has quickly established itself as an important tool for those seeking insight into the state of innovation around the world.

This historic building, Central Hall Westminster, hosted the very first meeting of the 51 founder nations of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council in 1946. It’s amazing to think how far the UN has come since then! Francis Gurry here now presides over its specialised IP agency which boasts 188 member states.

Innovation is a vital driver of global growth and economic prosperity. The UK, we like to think, remains one of the world’s leading innovators. Certainly we have a long tradition in producing the very best in science and research.

As the UK Intellectual Property Minister, I am of course aware of the vital role IP plays for countries seeking to protect and make the most of their knowledge economy. We have a good legal framework of rights in the UK and I am delighted that Taylor Wessing’s latest Global IP Index judged the UK to be the best place in the world to obtain, exploit and enforce IP rights.

The modern world is a connected world, and this report demonstrates that many emerging economies are growing in their innovation strength. This provides excellent opportunities for the UK to expand its collaboration portfolio, and through Innovate UK, the Government has established a network of elite Catapult Centres to commercialise new and emerging technologies in areas where there are large global market opportunities.

I am delighted to see that Simon Edmonds, Director of Innovate UK’s Catapult Programme, is on the panel today, and I don’t want to steal his thunder. I will just say however that the first 7 Catapults are open for business, with total public and private investment exceeding £1.4 billion over their first 5 years of operation. Two brand new Catapults, Energy Systems and Precision Medicine, have also started to operate as independent organisations and the Chancellor announced a new Medicines Technologies Catapult as part of July’s Productivity Plan.

GII assessment

The UK has so far done well in the GII rankings and we are cautiously hopeful that we will be able to sustain that position.

This year the UK also came second when measuring the quality of innovation globally. Overall, we hope and believe that the GII assessment reflects the positive economic environment in the UK.

Through the new £375 million Newton Fund, we will use our strength in research and innovation to promote the economic development and social welfare of partner countries. The fund forms part of the UK’s official development assistance ( ODA ) commitment and its primary focus is to develop the research and innovation capacity of nearly 20 partner countries for long-term sustainable growth.

Assessment of some of the factors that have led to success

The UK invests more in ideas and knowledge than it does in bricks and machinery. Latest figures show that investment in intangible assets outstrips tangible assets by £126 billion to £88 billion. Half of that investment is protected by IP rights. The UK Intellectual Property Office is today publishing its annual report on innovation and growth, setting out how we are developing the UK’s IP regime to support businesses.

Universities are key sources of knowledge and expertise for business. The UK has fine universities that provide us with the highly skilled workforce necessary to drive innovation, with 38 ranked among the 100 most international universities globally according to the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

The right business environment is a crucial foundation for private investment. Government has put in place a range of wider policies to support innovation. R&D tax credits and the Patent Box have a key role in underpinning growth and have supported R&D investment by business to the tune of £13.2 billion, claimed by a total of 15,120 businesses.

The UK has been successful in attracting funding for R&D from overseas. In 2011, the UK attracted almost $7 billion of overseas-financed R&D .

For UK businesses whose innovations have global potential, collaborating with international partners and opening market opportunities is increasingly important.

UK Trade and Investment and other UK innovation institutions have been working to increase the advice and support available to UK companies trading overseas. They have established strong platforms for collaboration with leading and emerging markets.

The government’s commitment to continue to support innovation

Innovation is at the core of the encouraging economic recovery in the UK. It is central to our future growth, underpinning our competitiveness and helping to capture the new customers and markets that secure our income.

Delivering an environment that nurtures innovative talents is a cornerstone of a thriving economy, and I am proud that the UK has retained its 2nd place global ranking. More importantly the government is committed to making Britain the best place in Europe to innovate, patent new ideas and start and grow a business.

I would like to thank you all for your interest in this important event and wish I could stay for what is set to be a fascinating panel discussion, but I’m afraid a parliamentary question on the future of the BBC beckons so I look forward to hearing about your discussions later.

I will now hand you over to the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, Mr Francis Gurry.

Speech: Launch of the 2015 Global Innovation Index

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 16:36:18 +0000

GII assessment

The UK has so far done well in the GII rankings and we are cautiously hopeful that we will be able to sustain that position.

This year the UK also came second when measuring the quality of innovation globally. Overall, we hope and believe that the GII assessment reflects the positive economic environment in the UK.

Assessment of some of the factors that have led to success

The UK has been successful in attracting funding for R&D from overseas. In 2011, the UK attracted almost $7 billion of overseas-financed R&D .

For UK businesses whose innovations have global potential, collaborating with international partners and opening market opportunities is increasingly important.

The government’s commitment to continue to support innovation

I will now hand you over to the Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, Mr Francis Gurry.

Press release: UK ranked as world-leader in innovation

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 13:55:24 +0000

The UK has today (17 September 2015) been ranked as the second most innovative country in the world. The Global Innovation Index ( GII ) has placed the UK above the USA, Singapore and Germany for the third year running, recognising the UK’s standing in the field of innovation.

The GII highlights the key role innovation plays as a driver of economic growth and prosperity. The UK has risen from tenth on the GII in 2011 to second in both 2014 and 2015. This is the most rapid increase among the top 10 GII -ranked innovation nations. It is the result of a well-balanced performance in terms of infrastructure, market sophistication, knowledge, technology and creative outputs.

Speaking at the Launch of the GII in London, Business Minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe DBE CMG said:

The UK has soared ahead in these global innovation rankings over the past few years, a further sign that our long-term economic plan is working.

We have an outstanding tradition in producing the very best in science and research: with less than 1% of the world’s population we produce 16% of the top quality published research. This is a major factor in the UK maintaining its position at number 2 in the 2015 Global Innovation Index.

As outlined in the Productivity Plan, the government is committed to support businesses in innovating and creating the ideas that help them grow. The UK is already home to 4 of the world’s top 10 universities and is ranked as the best place in the world to obtain, exploit and enforce intellectual property rights by the Taylor Wessing Global IP Index.

The announcement came as the Intellectual Property Office ( IPO ) published its annual report on innovation and growth. The report sets out how the government is developing the UK’s intellectual property regime to support innovative and growing businesses in the delivery of services including patents, copyright, trade marks and design, in enforcement in the digital marketplace and international policy making.

Notes to Editors

The Global Innovation Index 2015 ( GII ), in its eigth edition this year, is co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization ( WIPO , a specialised agency of the United Nations).
Published annually since 2007, the GII is now a leading benchmarking tool for business executives, policy makers and others, seeking insight into the state of innovation around the world.
See the full rankings under the GII 2015 here.
See the IPO ’s annual report on Innovation and Growth here.

Press release: PM's Extremism Taskforce: tackling extremism in universities and colleges top of the agenda

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 23:00:03 +0000

Jo Johnson writes to NUS to challenge their anti-Prevent agenda
Part of government’s one nation strategy, led by the Prime Minister’s Extremism Taskforce, to confront and ultimately defeat extremism

For the first time, universities and colleges in the UK will be legally required to put in place specific policies to stop extremists radicalising students on campuses, tackle gender segregation at events and support students at risk of radicalisation, as part of the government’s plans to counter extremism.

The updated Prevent duty guidance, scheduled to come into force at all UK higher and further education institutions by 21 September, requires establishments to ensure they have proper risk assessment processes for speakers and ensure those espousing extremist views do not go unchallenged. The guidance also sets out that institutions must ensure that they have appropriate IT policies, staff training and student welfare programmes in place to recognise and respond to the signs of radicalisation. This is all part of the government’s one nation strategy to confront and ultimately defeat the threat of extremism and terrorism, top of the agenda today at the first Extremism Taskforce meeting of this Parliament chaired by the Prime Minister.

Last year at least 70 events featuring hate speakers were held on campuses, according to the government’s new Extremism Analysis Unit, established to support all government departments and the wider public sector to understand extremism so they can deal with extremists appropriately. The latest police statistics show that young people continue to make up a disproportionately high number of those arrested for terrorist-related offences and of those travelling to join terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq.

Prime Minister David Cameron said:

I said in July that tackling extremism will be the struggle of our generation, one which we will defeat if we work together.

All public institutions have a role to play in rooting out and challenging extremism. It is not about oppressing free speech or stifling academic freedom, it is about making sure that radical views and ideas are not given the oxygen they need to flourish. Schools, universities and colleges, more than anywhere else, have a duty to protect impressionable young minds and ensure that our young people are given every opportunity to reach their potential. That is what our one nation government is focused on delivering.

As part of this work, the Universities Minister Jo Johnson has written to the National Union of Students to remind them of their responsibilities in preventing radicalisation and challenging speakers. In the letter he says :

Universities represent an important arena for challenging extremist views. It is important there can be active challenge and debate on issues relating to counter terrorism and provisions for academic freedom are part of the Prevent guidance for universities and colleges. It is my firm view that we all have a role to play in challenging extremist ideologies and protecting students on campus. Ultimately, the Prevent strategy is about protecting people from radicalisation. It is therefore disappointing to see overt opposition to the Prevent programme…The legal duty that will be placed on universities and colleges highlights the importance that the government places on this.

The Business Secretary has also instructed the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), as the lead regulator for higher education in England, to monitor universities’ implementation and compliance with the duty. Continued failure to comply could ultimately result in a court order.

Notes to editors

The Extremism Analysis Unit (EAU) has been established to support all government departments and the wider public sector to understand extremism so they can deal with extremists appropriately. In 2014 there were at least 70 events involving speakers who are known to have promoted rhetoric that aimed to undermine core British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, held on university campuses.

Queen Mary, King’s College, SOAS and Kingston University held most events. Events included the hosting of 6 speakers that are on record as expressing views contrary to British values, including Haitham Al-Haddad, Dr Uthman Lateef, Alomgir Ali, Imran Ibn Mansur (aka ‘Dawah Man’), Hamza Tzortis and Dr Salman Butt.

Institutions are already required to pay regard to their existing responsibilities in relation to gender segregation, as outlined in the guidance produced in 2014 by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Prevent Duty Guidance makes it a legal requirement (Section 29 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015). The duty is about protecting people from the poisonous and pernicious influence of extremist ideas that are used to legitimise terrorism.

People committing terrorist-related offences while at a UK university:

Erol Incedal, a law student at London South Bank University (LSBU), who was found guilty of possession of a bomb-making manual, in November 2014
Afsana Kayum, sentenced in March 2015 to 18 months in jail, for possession of a record containing information useful in the commission of terrorism contrary to the Terrorism Act – Kayum was a law student at the University of East London (UEL) at the time of her arrest

People who have attended a UK university and convicted of their role in terrorism and have likely been at least partially radicalised during their studies:

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, convicted in 2012 of attempted murder and terrorism, after trying to bomb a passenger flight to Detroit in 2009 – during his time at UCL, he had repeatedly contacted extremists who were under MI5 surveillance;
Roshonara Choudhry, who tried to assassinate the Labour MP Stephen Timms in May 2010, just weeks after dropping out of KCL because of its work with Israeli institutions and its research centre studying radicalisation

Radicalised foreign fighters who have studied in the UK:

Aqsa Mahmood, a radiography student at Glasgow Caledonian University, who dropped out of her course and travelled to Syria in late 2013
David Souaan, convicted, in December 2014, of preparing for terrorist acts – Souaan was a student at Birkbeck, University of London when he was arrested in May 2014 as he attempted to travel to Syria for a second time
Rashed Amani, believed to have travelled to Syria in March 2014 – Amani had been enrolled on a Business Studies course at Coventry University
Zubair Nur, reported to have travelled to Syria in March 2015, after it emerged that Royal Holloway, University of London had contacted his parents to inform them he had not attended lectures since January

Press release: Universities Minister demands better value for money for students

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 11:25:57 +0000

sets out action to support BME and disadvantaged white boys to get a degree
calls for students to get better value for money and consistently high-quality teaching from their universities
confirms green paper to be published in Autumn for consultation

Universities Minister Jo Johnson today (9 September 2015) outlined government plans to give students better value for money from their degrees by incentivising excellent teaching, greater transparency and ensuring student protection.

With a record number of students entering higher education this year, including many more starting science subjects and more from disadvantaged backgrounds than ever before, Johnson congratulated the sector on its hard work in a speech to university vice-chancellors.

However, Johnson called for more action to be taken to focus on the student experience, raise teaching standards and ensure universities welcome students from all backgrounds. The government’s green paper, which will be published in the Autumn will include measures to:

incentivise and reward higher quality teaching through the ‘Teaching Excellence Framework’
use previously unavailable data from UCAS to better understand how students’ background, prior attainment and course choices impact on access to higher education, particularly among young people from black and ethnic minority backgrounds
deregulate the system to improve competition and give students more choice

Universities Minister Jo Johnson said:

We have made strong progress to open up access to higher education but I’m still concerned about low participation rates for disadvantaged white boys and we must do more to raise outcomes for those from black and minority ethnic communities. Making university admissions data available will help the whole sector target its efforts much more effectively.

As a one nation government we want everyone to have the opportunity to work hard and reach their full potential. As Universities Minister, I hear too many stories from parents about their kids not getting enough teaching time or support from their university. While we have one of the best higher education sectors in the world, I want to make sure everyone who invests in a degree feels they are getting value for money.

Widening access

In order to help improve the representation of disadvantaged groups in higher education, the Universities Minister also announced a new agreement with UCAS to publish data on the outcomes of the admissions process.

This change is an important step in the drive to improve social mobility and will support the government’s commitment to double the proportion of students from disadvantaged backgrounds progressing to higher education by 2020 compared with 2009 and secure a 20% increase in black and ethnic minority students going to university.

The minister also confirmed his commitment to tackle the increasingly poor participation of white male students from disadvantaged backgrounds across the country.

The Teaching Excellence Framework

The green paper will place teaching at the heart of the university experience, with measures designed to enhance contact time with students. By bringing a sharper focus on the quality of teaching, the Teaching Excellence Framework ( TEF ) will provide incentives for those that improve their teaching, including the ability to raise their tuition fees in line with inflation.

Market reform

To provide students with greater choice of how and where to start a career, the green paper will also prioritise the removal of barriers to entry into the higher education market to open the door to challenger institutions, deliver greater competition and drive up standards.

To help remove some of these barriers, the Universities Minister today (9 September 2015) announced he will lift the moratorium on applications for new Degree Awarding Powers and University Titles. This will enable successful providers to challenge traditional institutions by offering more choice for students looking to study for a degree.

Notes to Editors

Jo Johnson was speaking at the Universities UK Conference at the University of Surrey. The full copy of the speech can be found at Higher education: fulfilling our potential.
The green paper will be published in the Autumn and will be open to consultation.
UCAS data shows the proportion of young people from the least advantaged backgrounds placed in higher education rose by 4% this year.
The agreement reached with UCAS involves:
- publishing their analysis of offer rates broken down by different groups (such as disadvantaged groups) at different types of institution (ie the most selective institutions). This would initially cover data for applicants for entry in 2010 to 2014. UCAS have agreed to do this first by ethnic group and will publish that shortly.
- UCAS has announced that it will start sharing data through the Administrative Data Research Network for customers who choose to do so. The first year of students would be 2016 entrants. They will look at all ways to make this data as useful as possible for researchers.
Once the moratorium on applications for Degree Awarding Powers and University Titles is lifted, the revised guidance for applications will be available on www.gov.uk.

Press release: Low carbon vehicles get government backing at annual sector show

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 10:54:00 +0000

Consortium led by Warwick Manufacturing Group announced as winner of £10 million low carbon battery prize
Soubry announces £20 million low carbon vehicle R&D competition

The Chancellor and the Business Minister Anna Soubry have today (9 September 2015) announced the winner of a £10 million low carbon battery prize.

Speaking at LCV2015, Anna Soubry announced that an automotive consortium led by Warwick Manufacturing Group had won a government backed £10 million Ultra Low Emission Battery Prize, which incentivises the development of the next generation of batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles in the UK.

Together, manufacturers Jaguar Land Rover, JCB, Alexander Dennis and Ariel Motors, successfully demonstrated the ability to build UK capability in the development of high voltage automotive battery packs. It will lay the foundations for a new UK automotive supply chain over the next 12 months.

The Minister also unveiled details of a £20 million low carbon vehicle R&D initiative led by the Office for Low Emission Vehicles ( OLEV ). The ‘Seeding Tomorrow’s Vehicle Technologies Today’ competition will support the development of new technology for road vehicles aimed at delivering significant reductions in CO2 and other emissions.

The Chancellor said:

It’s great news that a British consortium has won £10 million of government funding to develop a world-class ultra-low emission vehicle battery, and yet another demonstration that the UK is a global leader in high-skilled, innovative vehicle technology.

This is part of our plan to invest over £900 million this decade in ensuring that this country is the best place in the world to own, use or build a high-tech, low-emission car – helping to support the 150,000 jobs created by automotive manufacturing in the UK.

Business Minister Anna Soubry added:

Together these projects will help keep the British low carbon vehicle industry at the cutting edge – generating valuable trade and investment opportunities and new highly-skilled jobs. The £20 million competition will springboard some of the UK’s best low carbon vehicle innovations to market and Warwick Manufacturing Group’s battery project will create a new UK supply chain in a field with huge growth opportunities.

Professor Lord Bhattacharyya, Chairman of WMG said:

The global energy storage market will be worth $50 billion by 2020; of this, $21 billion will be in transportation. Automotive is well on its way to displacing consumer electronics as the biggest user of energy storage. This project will play a significant role in the evolution of that market by creating a UK supply chain for battery packs to suit hybrid and electric vehicles requiring volumes from hundreds to thousands of units per year. It will also create a lasting facility at WMG for the development of future battery packs. This will also create thousands of jobs in this field.

Notes to editors:

Innovate UK and OLEV awarded The University of Warwick’s ( WMG ) Automated Module-to-pack Pilot Line For Industrial Innovation (AMPLiFII) project £9,999,178 for its project that developed a pilot production line which will be used for developing the processes necessary for complete battery production in the future. The total proposed project costs were £13,289,797.
Innovate UK will run the competition from 7 September 2015 to 28 October 2015 with registration closing on the 21 October 2015. A full competition brief can be found here and you can register and apply for the £20 million prize on the Innovate UK site.

Speech: Higher education: fulfilling our potential

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 10:00:19 +0000

Introduction – reflections on this year’s university admissions

It’s a pleasure to be here at the start of a new academic year.

And it is a vintage one.

Record numbers of students accepted onto their first choice courses. Record numbers applying from disadvantaged backgrounds. And record numbers studying science subjects.

Every single additional place we make available will change someone’s life forever.

I felt this myself when I joined the call centre team at UCAS in Cheltenham on A Level results day and listened to the explosion of excitement down the telephone line when a student who feared the worst learnt he had secured a place at Oxford Brookes.

A story made possible because of the steps taken by this government. Half a century ago, the Robbins Report said university places “should be available to all who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them.”

We are the first government to live up to this guiding principle. Our mission as a one nation government is to ensure everyone has the opportunity to work hard and fulfil their potential. By lifting the cap on student numbers, we have ensured that our world-class higher education system is open to anyone with the potential to benefit from it.

We have no target for the “right” size of the higher education system, but believe it should evolve in response to demand from students and employers, reflecting the needs of the economy.

That’s why we must make sure that the young people who made it through the UCAS clearing process this summer feel it was all worthwhile, that more does not mean worse. They must receive the rigorous, stimulating education they want and society needs.

Green paper aims

My plan today is to set out a broader vision for higher education, foreshadowing a green paper we will publish in the autumn.

Looking back at 2011, when we published Students at the Heart of the System, it is clear that huge progress has been made: in transparency and widening participation, but also in the way the system has been put on a sustainable financial footing and been opened up to competition, with more new providers allowed to enter the market in the last 5 years than at any time since 1992.

But there is considerable unfinished business and the green paper will seek views on the changes the government believes will be necessary to ensure that higher education continues to be a great national success story in the years to come.

Teaching at the heart of the system

At the centre of this vision are the young people contemplating their futures in a world where no one owes them a living, where they must depend on their wits and drive to survive.

Well-equipped students ready to contribute to society and to businesses keen to employ increasing numbers of skilled graduates. That was the focus of my last speech to you and it remains my overriding priority.

We have all been reminded of the scale of the challenge by a recent CIPD survey suggesting that almost 60% of graduates are in non-graduate jobs.

While it may overstate matters — official statistics show that in fact only 20% of recent graduates did not find a graduate level job within 3 years of leaving college — it is clear that universities must do more to demonstrate they add real and lasting value for all students.

Now that we are asking young people to meet more of the costs of their degrees once they are earning, we in turn must do more than ever to ensure they can make well-informed choices, and that the time and money they invest in higher education is well spent.

As I said in my speech in July, the key to that is, in my view, great teaching, combined with rigorous assessment, useful feedback and preparation for the world of work.

Our plans to introduce new incentives for universities to focus on teaching, via the Teaching Excellence Framework ( TEF ) promised in our manifesto, will be a critical element of this autumn’s consultation.

Speaking to parents and students since taking on this job has confirmed for me the extent to which teaching is highly variable across higher education.

There are inspiring academics who go the extra mile, supporting struggling students, emailing feedback at weekends and giving much more of their time than duty demands.

These are the people who will change our children’s lives and I want every student to learn from and have access to the kind of teacher who suffered me when I was an undergraduate.

People like Martin Conway, who could make even Belgian stamps interesting as we learnt about the construction of post-war Europe; or Judith Brown, the biographer of Gandhi, who sparked in me a lasting interest in modern India.

But there are also institutions and individual academics that take a different approach; that have struck what academics David Palfreyman and Ted Tapper describe as a “disengagement contract” with their students:

This goes along the lines of ‘I don’t want to have to set and mark much by way of essays and assignments which would be a distraction from my research, and you don’t want to do coursework that would distract you from partying: so we’ll award you the degree as the hoped-for job ticket in return for compliance with minimal academic requirements and due receipt of fees’.

This is not a contract I want taxpayers to underwrite.

Because many universities see their reputation, their standing in prestigious international league tables and their marginal funding as being principally determined by scholarly output, teaching has regrettably been allowed to become something of a poor cousin to research in parts of our system.

I hear this when I talk to worried parents, such as the physics teacher whose son dropped out at the start of year two of a humanities programme at a prestigious London university, having barely set eyes on his tutor. Her other son, by contrast, studying engineering at Bristol, saw the system at its best: he was worked off his feet, with plenty of support and mostly excellent teaching.

This patchiness in the student experience within and between institutions cannot continue. There is extraordinary teaching that deserves greater recognition. And there is lamentable teaching that must be driven out of our system. It damages the reputation of UK higher education and I am determined to address it.

Greater transparency from providers

Since the 2012 reforms, student choice has become a key driver of change, but there are still significant information asymmetries. It is not at all clear to some students what their tuition fees of up-to £9,000 a year actually pay for, and this has led to calls, which I support, for greater transparency from providers about what they spend fee income on.

This will mean providers becoming much clearer with students about what they can expect during their time at university. The new framework will aim to give students more information about the actual teaching they will receive, drive up student engagement with the learning process and reward universities that do most to stretch young - and also not so young - minds.

It will help, I hope, create a culture where teaching has equal status with research, with our great teachers enjoying the same professional recognition and opportunities for career and pay progression as our great researchers.

I recognise that many institutions are already thinking in this way and that the National Student Survey has started to shift the focus back towards teaching, feedback and academic support within universities. But some still do not do nearly enough.

While there will be financial incentives behind the TEF , with those offering high quality teaching able to increase fees with inflation, the TEF will not just be about accessing additional funds – I want it to bring about a fundamental shift in how we think about and value teaching in our universities.

Widening participation

Raising the quality of teaching is at the heart of the green paper, but our ambitions extend beyond this important goal. As a one nation government, our focus is on driving forward social mobility. That’s why the green paper will also consult on how we can accelerate progress in widening participation, so that many more people with ability can benefit from higher education.

Our universities should be open to everyone who can benefit from them, regardless of family background or ability to pay.

The Prime Minister is committed to doubling the entry rate from disadvantaged backgrounds by 2020, compared to 2009 levels.

We also want to see a 20% increase in the number of black and minority ethnic students going to university by 2020, with matched improvements in their completion rates and progression into work. Young people with a Caribbean heritage will need special attention as part of this work and I will be discussing this with HEFCE and OFFA , and my counterparts at the Department for Education.

Among the many concerning features highlighted by BIS research into this issue is the persistent underperformance in education of white children eligible for free school meals. The problem is particularly acute for disadvantaged white boys. Barely 10% of white British boys from the most disadvantaged backgrounds go to university, making them 5 times less likely to study at this level than the most advantaged white boys. They are also doing worse compared to the most disadvantaged among other ethnic groups, with participation rates over 20% for boys of black Caribbean heritage, nearly 50% for boys of Indian heritage and over 60% for boys of Chinese heritage.

Prior attainment in school is a major factor driving differences in participation, but attitudes towards university, which can be shaped by good careers advice and employer engagement, also play a part. Discussions with Office for Fair Access have suggested that there is the potential for us to have significant impact by raising the profile of this group, which has not been specifically targeted in the past.

This needs serious attention and I will be writing to OFFA asking them to focus on this in their guidance to institutions on 2017 to 2018 access agreements.

To make our work on widening participation effective, we need the best possible data.

UCAS in particular holds and publishes vast amounts of data on the outcomes of the admissions process, but to target widening participation efforts more effectively we need a better understanding of how students’ background, prior attainment and course choices lead to an offer of a place.

That’s why I have written to UCAS asking them to publish a recent analysis of offers, broken down by ethnic group and type of institution. They have also agreed to publish the data underpinning this work and extend their analysis to other protected and disadvantaged groups. The first analysis will be published in the next few weeks.

But we need to go further to increase confidence that the system treats all applicants fairly. I want to see much more data being made available for academics to analyse and potentially link with other data sets. I’m pleased that UCAS has agreed to start sharing data through the secure platform developed by the Administrative Data Research Network. And they have agreed to look at all ways to make this data as useful as possible for researchers.

This is an important step forward. But there will be more work to do to increase the data available and ensure the trust of students who are involved. This is an issue for the whole sector to address, which is why I want you to consider what additional information universities can provide to support our collective efforts to widen participation.

A level playing field for new providers

To ensure students have real choice that reflects their diverse needs, we must continue to open up the higher education market and put in place a regulatory framework that reflects today’s challenges.

For many people, entry to higher education does not follow the traditional route of A-Levels followed by a full-time, residential, 3 year degree. Some choose to undertake a pathway that might include a foundation degree, Higher National Diploma, Higher National Certificate or Apprenticeship, while others enter higher education later in life after a period in the workforce.

This government values competition. We want a diverse, competitive system that can offer different types of higher education so that students can choose freely between a wide range of providers.

Competition not for its own sake, but because it empowers students and creates a strong incentive for providers to innovate and improve the quality of the education they are offering. That’s why, back in July, we published our Productivity Plan, ‘Fixing the Foundations’.

It set out how we’re going to boost productivity in this country. Among other goals, it promised to remove barriers to new entrants and to establish a risk-based framework for higher education, reducing burdens on some so we can focus oversight where it is needed.

The green paper will cast a critical eye over the processes for awarding access to student support funding, Degree Awarding Powers and University Title.

We have already made a start by providing a new route for trusted new and smaller providers to grow their student numbers. We are also beginning to link student number controls to the quality of the provider, through a “performance pool” which will operate for 2016 to 2017.

But the green paper will consult on options to go further. Success in higher education should be based on merit, not on incumbency. I want to fulfil our aim of a level playing field for all providers of higher education.

Many of you validate degree courses at alternative providers. Many choose not to do so. I know some validation relationships work well, but the requirement for new providers to seek out a suitable validating body from amongst the pool of incumbents is quite frankly anti-competitive. It’s akin to Byron Burger having to ask permission of McDonald’s to open up a new restaurant.

It stifles competition, innovation and student choice, which is why we will consult on alternative options for new providers if they do not want to go down the current validation route.

Towards a single gateway for degree awarding powers

The ultimate goal for many new providers is to secure their own Degree Awarding Powers and University Title.

This now takes many years, even for the best, most highly rated new providers. As part of the green paper, we will ask how we can speed up the process for those that offer the best quality education.

In the meantime, we will continue to support new entrants. Having taken action to improve the process, I can announce that we will shortly be lifting the moratorium that has been in place for applications for new Degree Awarding Powers and for University Title. Once again, we are opening the doors to new entrants and challenger institutions, all in the interest of increasing the choices available to students.

Providers entering and leaving the market is a sign of healthy competition, and it is something of which we should expect to see more. But we need to be prepared for the fact that some providers may exit the market. Our higher education sector should only have room for high quality providers. We will therefore be consulting on measures to require all providers to have protection measures in place so that students who benefit from greater choice and diversity do not lose out in the event of provider failure.

There will be some who are resistant to this change. Those who want to put up the barriers and bar the windows. But I want our higher education sector to remain the envy of the world. Allowing new providers to enrich the sector is part of that.

A transformed regulatory landscape

So the reforms we will set out in the green paper will improve teaching quality, empower students, open up the higher education market and drive value for money. To deliver our ambitions, we also plan to reform the higher education and research system architecture.

We are a deregulatory government, and much of the higher education system is ripe for simplification. When I arrived in BIS , my day one pack included a diagram of the higher education landscape. It was a stunning piece of PowerPoint – and must have been produced by a skilled hand. But the complexity – and associated cost both for the sector and directly for government – drove home the need for simplification.

The market has evolved far more quickly than the regulatory environment, and that is something we need to address. Our regulatory regime is still based upon a system where government directly funds institutions rather than reflecting the fact that students are the purchasers, and needful of all the protections that consumers of complex high value products receive in other regulated markets. We fund higher education in a very different way now to the block grants of the past. Students are the primary source of income for undergraduate study, but their interests are insufficiently represented in our structures and systems.

There are also parallel regulatory regimes for different types of higher education providers. I want to be in a position where all higher education providers operate on a level playing field. That was part of the vision in 2011 and it remains our goal.

So we need a simpler, less bureaucratic and less expensive system of regulation. A system that explicitly champions the student, employer and taxpayer interest in ensuring value for their investment in education and requires transparency from providers so that they can be held accountable for it. One that protects institutional autonomy and academic freedom and maintains the highest quality of higher education, safeguarding the strong international reputation of English universities.

Our thinking will also of course take account of the emerging recommendations from Sir Paul Nurse’s review of the research system architecture. I am committed to the maintenance of dual funding support, to the Haldane principle and to scientific excellence, but do see scope for a simpler system of delivering vital research funding to universities and opportunities to increase its strategic impact. It is also clear to me that there are many in the sector demanding a process for assessing the quality of scholarly output that is less bureaucratic and burdensome to academics and takes up less of the time that they could be spending more fruitfully on research and also, of course, on teaching.

Conclusion

So as we celebrate record student numbers, we need to recognise that there is still more to be done to reshape the higher education landscape around students themselves:

more to be done to drive up the quality of teaching and ensure all students can aspire to a fulfilling graduate career
more to be done to widen participation so that everyone has the opportunity to get ahead
more to be done to reduce the regulatory burden and create a level playing field for new competitors
more to be done to increase the efficiency and strategic impact of our research

With these changes higher education fulfils its full potential: not just as an engine of economic growth and productivity, but also, now that student number controls have been lifted, as the most powerful driver of social mobility we have.

Speech: Higher education: fulfilling our potential

Wed, 09 Sep 2015 10:00:19 +0000

Introduction – reflections on this year’s university admissions

It’s a pleasure to be here at the start of a new academic year.

And it is a vintage one.

Record numbers of students accepted onto their first choice courses. Record numbers applying from disadvantaged backgrounds. And record numbers studying science subjects.

Every single additional place we make available will change someone’s life forever.

We have no target for the “right” size of the higher education system, but believe it should evolve in response to demand from students and employers, reflecting the needs of the economy.

Green paper aims

My plan today is to set out a broader vision for higher education, foreshadowing a green paper we will publish in the autumn.

Teaching at the heart of the system

At the centre of this vision are the young people contemplating their futures in a world where no one owes them a living, where they must depend on their wits and drive to survive.

We have all been reminded of the scale of the challenge by a recent CIPD survey suggesting that almost 60% of graduates are in non-graduate jobs.

As I said in my speech in July, the key to that is, in my view, great teaching, combined with rigorous assessment, useful feedback and preparation for the world of work.

Speaking to parents and students since taking on this job has confirmed for me the extent to which teaching is highly variable across higher education.

There are inspiring academics who go the extra mile, supporting struggling students, emailing feedback at weekends and giving much more of their time than duty demands.

These are the people who will change our children’s lives and I want every student to learn from and have access to the kind of teacher who suffered me when I was an undergraduate.

This goes along the lines of ‘I don’t want to have to set and mark much by way of essays and assignments which would be a distraction from my research, and you don’t want to do coursework that would distract you from partying: so we’ll award you the degree as the hoped-for job ticket in return for compliance with minimal academic requirements and due receipt of fees’.

This is not a contract I want taxpayers to underwrite.

Greater transparency from providers

Widening participation

Our universities should be open to everyone who can benefit from them, regardless of family background or ability to pay.

The Prime Minister is committed to doubling the entry rate from disadvantaged backgrounds by 2020, compared to 2009 levels.

This needs serious attention and I will be writing to OFFA asking them to focus on this in their guidance to institutions on 2017 to 2018 access agreements.

To make our work on widening participation effective, we need the best possible data.

A level playing field for new providers

This government values competition. We want a diverse, competitive system that can offer different types of higher education so that students can choose freely between a wide range of providers.

The green paper will cast a critical eye over the processes for awarding access to student support funding, Degree Awarding Powers and University Title.

It stifles competition, innovation and student choice, which is why we will consult on alternative options for new providers if they do not want to go down the current validation route.

Towards a single gateway for degree awarding powers

The ultimate goal for many new providers is to secure their own Degree Awarding Powers and University Title.

This now takes many years, even for the best, most highly rated new providers. As part of the green paper, we will ask how we can speed up the process for those that offer the best quality education.

A transformed regulatory landscape

Conclusion

So as we celebrate record student numbers, we need to recognise that there is still more to be done to reshape the higher education landscape around students themselves:

more to be done to drive up the quality of teaching and ensure all students can aspire to a fulfilling graduate career
more to be done to widen participation so that everyone has the opportunity to get ahead
more to be done to reduce the regulatory burden and create a level playing field for new competitors
more to be done to increase the efficiency and strategic impact of our research

Press release: Business Secretary calls on universities to tackle violence against women on campus

Sun, 06 Sep 2015 09:00:11 +0000

Universities UK has been asked to set up and lead the taskforce with the support of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The taskforce will work with the higher education sector, to develop a code of practice to bring about cultural change, leverage existing complaints mechanisms more effectively and improve engagement with Crime Prevention Officers.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid said:

Nobody should be put off going to University because of fears about their safety. If my children choose that path, I would expect my daughter to be as safe as my son on any campus in this country. This taskforce will ensure that universities have a plan to stamp out violence against women and provide a safe environment for all their students.

We do not tolerate this behaviour in any part of society and I’m not prepared to let it take place on university campuses unchecked.

The taskforce is expected to be convened in the autumn (2015) and work over a 12 month period.

In a letter to Nicola Dandridge, CEO of Universities UK, the taskforce has been asked to:

develop a code of practice for institutions to support cultural change
explore how a kitemark scheme could be developed and awarded to successful institutions
explore how better to engage with Crime Prevention Officers
ensure best use of the existing complaints mechanisms such as the Equality and Human Rights Commission ( EHRC ) and, for students, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator
encourage institutions to ensure that the right links are in place with existing local activity, including through the Home Office Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy

Universities Minister, Jo Johnson said:

“Universities already take their responsibilities for the safety of all students incredibly seriously. They have strong clear legal duties through the Equalities Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty. This task force will make sure that the universities are doing all they can to meet their legal obligations and, will see where they can go further.

The taskforce will report back to the Universities Minister Jo Johnson and the Secretary of State for the Department for Business.

Notes to editors

Official data is not available but 1 in 7 women responding to the NUS Hidden Marks survey had experienced a serious physical or sexual assault during their time as a student. Over 2 thirds had experienced verbal or non-verbal harassment, including groping, flashing and unwanted sexual comments, and 12% of respondents had been subjected to stalking.
We have asked Universities UK to set up the task force and will confirm full membership in due course.
Many universities are currently involved in campaigns and initiatives, often with Students’ Unions, to help guarantee student safety. Nationally, Universities UK has been working with others such as the Equality Challenge Unit on lad culture, sexual harassment and sexual violence at universities.
Universities UK Chief Executive Nicola Dandridge last week published a blog on the scale of the issue and the work institutions are doing.
The Universities UK taskforce will complement the government’s Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, led by the Home Office. We will be publishing a new Strategy in the autumn (2015) and are consulting on it at the moment.

Open consultation: Freezing the student loan repayment threshold

Wed, 22 Jul 2015 16:00:00 +0000

We are consulting to gather views on a proposal to keep the student loan repayment threshold at the same level for 5 years.

This new proposal was announced in the Budget on 8 July. The government wants to ensure higher education remains open and affordable to students, graduates and taxpayers in the long-term.

Speech: One Nation Science

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 11:33:56 +0000

It’s a pleasure to be here to see first-hand how universities and businesses across the region are coming together to power innovation and growth.

The Prime Minister and Chancellor have been clear that this is a ‘One Nation Government’, and today I want to talk about ‘One Nation Science’. That means 2 things:

upholding the very best in British science and research. We should be proud of our science base – it’s one of our country’s great success stories. With less than 1% of the world’s population, the UK produces 16% of top quality published research
it also means developing that excellence for the whole country, making sure all areas and all groups of people can reach their full potential

One Nation Science is bold and ambitious. And that’s why in our manifesto, we set a clear goal: for Britain to be the best place in Europe to innovate, patent new ideas and set up and expand a business. That mission extends to all parts of the UK.

I am delighted to be at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre ( AMRC ) to see for myself the strong base on which we want to build. Yorkshire has a reputation for the practical and you should be proud of the practical impact of the work you do.

When our Army needed a tougher suspension system for its Warrior vehicles, Sheffield’s Tinsley Bridge answered the call. They developed the ‘Extralite’ torsion bar in just 5 months, with a Smart award from Innovate UK. This new system was stronger and lifted vehicles higher off the ground, saving lives by increasing troop protection against IEDs and mines.

There are many more examples. So it’s no surprise that Innovate UK has invested over £61 million in Yorkshire since 2010, including last year over £12 million to projects in the Sheffield City Region. I’m pleased to be here in the University of Sheffield, home to 2 nodes of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, in Advanced Machining and Materials and in Nuclear, with well over 100 industrial partners.

Productivity and investment in science

This city is a great place to talk about the role of science and innovation in boosting our country’s productivity.

Public investment in science delivers strong returns to the economy of at least 20% per annum, and leverages in private investment. We are today publishing research that shows that every pound of UK public funding for research generates between £1.13 and £1.60 of private investment and we know that private investment generates further returns to the UK economy of up to 50%.

This is why UK taxpayers invest £10 billion a year in research and innovation.

We protected the science budget in cash terms through the last Parliament.

And this is why we will now invest new capital on a record scale – £6.9 billion in new equipment, new laboratories and new research institutes across the UK. This new science capital also includes £2.9 billion for a Grand Challenges Fund, which will allow us to invest in major facilities of national and international significance, such as our £235 million investment in the Sir Henry Royce Institute for materials research and innovation, based in Manchester but with a hub in Sheffield.

Touring the UK

Since starting as Science Minister a few weeks ago, I have been travelling the country to see how this record capital investment is being put to good use.

At the Met Office in Exeter, I saw how our £97 million investment in a new supercomputer will cement the UK as the most accurate national weather forecaster in the world. Today a 4 day weather forecast is as accurate as a 1 day forecast 30 years ago, with implications for industries such as aviation, shipping and agriculture. This computer will be 13 times more powerful than the current system, able to perform more than 16,000 trillion calculations per second.

At the Diamond Light Source in Harwell, which I visited last week, I saw how our investment is enabling scientists to probe deep into the basic structure of matter, allowing over 7000 researchers to develop new products from medicines to biofuels.

And last month, in launching a £113 million ‘big data’ investment partnership with IBM at the Hartree Centre in Daresbury, I saw how we are managing to ‘crowd in’ private investment. Expanding the Hartree Centre substantially, both at Daresbury and Harwell, will encourage ‘big data’ companies to co-locate, as IBM has done with a package worth up to £200 million.

IBM is far from alone. Over the past year we have seen an 11% increase in inward investment projects with an R&D element. Such collaborations are often a precursor to major foreign direct investment, paving the way for long-term relationships.

Alongside this great science at home, British scientists are leaders in their fields abroad, winning an outsized share of European grants. I’m pleased today to announce that the UK is joining the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. This will reinforce the contribution that British researchers make to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Innovation

So as we look to make Britain best place in Europe to innovate, we start from a position of strength. But we need to do more, not just to commercialise past research, but to meet future challenges too.

That is why Ann Dowling’s recent Review of Business-University Research Collaboration is important. We will respond to her recommendations by the Spending Review, including how to take forward the central recommendation of simplifying support for business.

And we mean business on this. Our universities are successfully engaging with industry and the returns from collaborations are now greater than ever before. HEFCE ’s latest report on business-university interaction – published today, shows the value of these partnerships has reached record levels. Our Productivity Plan set out our ambition for universities to continue to increase their collaborations to £5 billion per annum by 2025.

Our innovation agency, Innovate UK, is developing a new strategic plan that will help achieve this vision. As part of this plan Innovate UK will set out how it will build on excellence throughout the UK, working with others to identify where it can invest locally in areas of strength to help support the development of clusters.

We know that the only way to secure a truly national recovery is through a fundamental rebalancing of the British economy. This is why we have committed to 28 City Deals, signed a historic Devolution Agreement with Greater Manchester and are working towards further devolution for Sheffield City Region and elsewhere.

To ensure that productivity grows nationally we need to empower cities like Sheffield to reach their full potential. Productivity here is currently less than half that in Oxford and London. Research and innovation have a critical role to play in plugging these productivity gaps around the country.

One Nation Science

At present, 46% of public investment in research goes to the golden triangle. This reflects the strength of internationally-renowned universities in London, Oxford and Cambridge. We must and we will continue to fund research on the basis of excellence and ensure we are competing with the very best in the world.

But we do have to ensure we recognise that other parts of the country have proven research excellence in their universities, and ensure we fund excellence wherever it is found in order to realise the productivity gains that we have seen in the Golden Triangle. To achieve this we need a new approach – one that promotes and protects our reputation for world-class science, and also drives growth and raises productivity for the whole of the UK.

Science and innovation ‘audits’

So the first part of One Nation science is to take a more thoughtful approach to place. I have asked officials to work with local areas to develop ‘audits’ mapping local research and innovation strengths and infrastructure. These deep dives will provide a new way to identify and build on areas of greatest potential in every region.

As preparation for this, we are today publishing Mapping Local Comparative Advantage in Innovation, bringing together for the first time a range of research and innovation indicators for each of the 39 Local Enterprise Partnership areas in England.

For the audits themselves, we want consortia of higher education and research institutions, local partners and business to come forward- and we will make resources available from government, Research Councils, HEFCE and Innovate UK to help analyse and interpret the rich data sources to understand the areas of greatest potential.

These audits will be open and transparent. They will help local areas to identify emerging scientific strengths. And they should help focus efforts to access £580 million of EU Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) available for R&D . Together with match funding the total pot exceeds £1 billion.

In government, they will give us the tools to recognise and reward excellent research proposals that reflect local strengths and leverage local funds. In our Productivity Plan, we set out how the Research Partnership Investment Fund will in future consider the potential for local economic growth and local collaboration, alongside the focus on excellence

I welcome that Paul Nurse is looking at this as part of his wider review and look forward to his report later this year.

Catapults across the country

The Productivity Plan also committed to look for opportunities to develop the UK’s network of Catapults and spread the benefits. Just this week, the Chancellor announced new locations that will benefit. The Precision Medicine Catapult headquarters will be located in Cambridge, with centres of excellence in the North of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and southern England - creating a Catapult presence in several parts of the country that have not yet benefitted from this network.

And building on the life sciences excellence identified in the north west with the Precision Medicine Catapult, we have also announced a new Medicines Technologies Catapult in Alderley Park in Cheshire. With the existing Cell Therapy Catapult, this will put the UK in a leading position to support all stages of the life sciences innovation cycle. Working with Innovate UK, I have agreed that this new approach of considering the location alongside technologies would continue for any future Catapults.

STEM skills and diversity

One Nation Science is about more than place and our economic geography. The second aspect I want to talk about is people. If UK research is to reach its full potential, we must also make best use of all the tremendous talent we have here in the UK.

The last government was determined to improve diversity in public appointments and this government will keep up that momentum. But in science and innovation, the focus cannot be limited to public appointments alone. We need to take a holistic approach, looking at the whole talent pipeline, from STEM teaching in schools through to research grants and the diversity of sector leadership.

Schools

For our schools, we have announced £67 million for the next 5 years to recruit and train an extra 2,500 maths and physics teachers and upskill 15,000 existing maths and physics teachers.

Our STEM Ambassadors programme is doing important work to inspire more young people into science, and especially girls. We must push for faster progress. Only one in ten Computing students is female. And only 19% of girls who achieved the top grade in GCSE physics go on to study physics at A-Level, compared to 49% of boys.

And last year we initiated the Your Life campaign which aims to increase participation in maths and science studies at age 16 and beyond, with an ambitious target to increase the number of students taking maths and physics at A level by 50% in 3 years.

Apprenticeships

I know that apprenticeships are a subject close to the hearts of many here today: you have a very strong apprenticeship programme here at the AMRC , with 600 young people taking advanced apprenticeships. I am looking forward to meeting some of your apprentices shortly.

And I am pleased to be able to announce today that the University of Sheffield is further expanding the AMRC ’s successful apprenticeship programme, to create pioneering degree-level apprenticeships, with the support of a £1.6 million grant from HEFCE . This will provide new work-based routes for young people to achieve professional Chartered Engineer status.

This exciting new programme will widen access to higher education and technical training. This is a core part of One Nation Science. I know from personal experience how a lack of ‘science capital’ in a family can pass on across the generations. No group should feel excluded; no group should be made to feel that science is “not for them”.

Universities/ STEM workforce

When we inspire people into science and engineering, we need to make sure that they have the opportunities to progress. That’s why an important strand of the Your Life campaign is the call to action under which over 200 organisations are taking steps to encourage the appointment and progression of people from a wide range of backgrounds: particularly women.

We support the Athena Swan charter, which recognises employers’ commitment to advancing the careers of women in higher education and research, and we have funded an extension of the charter to Research Institutes. And we have also set up the STEM Diversity Programme, led by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. As part of this, the Royal Academy of Engineering working with engineering employers to widen their approach to recruitment.

Grants

There is much more to do. Data shows that women are under-represented in grant applications when compared to the academic population for most research councils. I commend the work of Professor Jackie Hunter of RCUK , who has been challenging universities on their diversity performance.

I know partner organisations share my concerns and are already taking action. RCUK published a statement of expectations on equality and diversity in 2013 intended to drive more rapid cultural change in institutions receiving Research Council funding.

We now have 3 years of research council grant applications and peer review data that analyses success rates by diversity. I have asked them to give me an action plan to address this continuing under-representation by December.

Vice Chancellors

I am pleased to see a number of distinguished, experienced women taking the helm recently as university vice chancellors. These appointments mean that the number of women leading universities will increase by about 20% compared with last year, but still represent less than a quarter of university leaders. Universities themselves recognise the need to go further.

Public appointments

Research Council Boards will have moved from one in four female appointments in July 2014 to around 2 in 5 by September 2015, with 2 councils achieving 50:50 gender balance. But again more needs to be done to improve representation of ethnic minorities and the disabled.

Conclusion

As we head into the Spending Review, we know we couldn’t have a Chancellor more committed to research.

In delivering One Nation Science, we will seize the once in a generation opportunity we now have to find an extra gear for the British economy, and ensure higher living standards for generations to come.

I look forward to working with you all to ensure we rise to this challenge.

Speech: Research, innovate, grow: the role of science in our long-term economic plan

Thu, 02 Jul 2015 13:08:36 +0000

Introduction

Thank you for the invitation to speak at this important conference.

I’m glad to address this important theme - ‘Research, innovate, grow’ - which precisely captures the role of science in our long-term economic plan.

Great science is, of course, important in its own right as well as yielding enormous practical benefits– curing diseases, driving technological innovation, promoting business investment and informing public policy for the better.

UK taxpayers invest £10 billion a year in research and innovation.

This government has prioritised research funding and ensured that the ring-fence was protected this financial year, even as we had to make difficult decisions about cuts elsewhere.

And we will invest new capital on a record scale – £6.9 billion in the UK’s research infrastructure up to 2021 – which will mean new equipment, new laboratories and new research institutes.

This long-term commitment includes £2.9 billion for a Grand Challenges Fund, which will allow us to invest in major research facilities of national significance, such as the new Turing Institute, our new state-of-the-art Polar Research Vessel, which will enable UK polar scientists to remain at the forefront of Arctic and Antarctic research, and the Square Kilometre Array - the largest radio telescope and the largest scientific instrument on the planet.

We should be rightly proud of the fact that we will host the headquarters of the Square Kilometre Array telescope at Manchester University’s Jodrell Bank.

Touring the UK

In my role, I’m travelling the length and breadth of the country to see how this record capital investment is being put to good use across the UK. I’m seeing first-hand the impact of our science base, and the work of the Research Councils.

I visited the Met Office 10 days ago, where we are investing £97 million in a new supercomputer that will be 13 times more powerful than their current system. I learned in advance of the heatwave we are now experiencing. Very accurate, it was too. This investment will cement the UK’s position as a world leader in weather and climate prediction.

In my visit to the Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering in Leeds, home to 4 EPSRC centres, I saw pioneering research on biological scaffolds that has underpinned the development of Tissue Regenix, one of the UK’s leading spin-outs in medical technology

I have also recently had the privilege to launch a £113 million capital investment partnership with IBM at the Hartree Centre in Daresbury. This investment represents a leap forward for high-performance computing and our capability to analyse and use big data, as well as for the North West and the UK. IBM will further support the project with a package worth up to £200 million.

This is one example of how public sector funding leverages private sector support.

The idea is that expanding the Hartree Centre substantially, both at Daresbury and Harwell will encourage global and UK companies active in data centric research to co-locate and to join the research programme, bringing additional inward investment.

Over the past year we have seen an 11% increase in inward investment projects with an R&D element. Such collaborations are often a precursor to major foreign direct investment, paving the way for long-term relationships.

Commitment to innovation

As we set out in our manifesto, the government is committed to making Britain the best place in Europe to innovate, patent new ideas and start and grow a business. We need to do more to help universities and businesses work more closely. Not just to commercialise past research, but to help inspire current and future research to meet the challenges of a fiercely competitive global market. Later today I am looking forward to attending the launch of the Professor Dame Ann Dowling’s review, which will no doubt provide many valuable insights into how UK businesses and universities can collaborate more effectively.

The government has already committed to a range of measures aimed at encouraging business to invest in and adopt new research and development. These include our plans to create over 1,000 jobs in high-tech small businesses by 2020 through our investment in 4 University Enterprise Zones, spread across the country in Bristol, Bradford, Liverpool and Nottingham.

This government has also committed to creating more Catapults – R&D hubs in the technologies of the future – to ensure that we have a bold and comprehensive offer to enable Britain’s researchers and innovators to commercialise more emerging technologies, technologies where the UK has the potential to lead the world.

I’ve already visited 2 of the 7 in the existing network of Catapults - Cell Therapy and Future Cities. At Future Cities, I met businesses large and small and universities, working with the Catapult on their innovations. It was good to hear the difference that the Catapults are making to those businesses with which they work.

Conclusion

As we head into the Budget and the Spending Review, we know we couldn’t have a Chancellor more committed to research. The Chancellor has said science is a personal passion. As he set out in his CBI speech last month, science and innovation are a vital element of our productivity plan. And I give you my personal commitment that I will also be a champion for Great British science and research.

We have a once in a generation opportunity, right now, to find an extra gear for the British economy, and ensure higher living standards for the next generation to come. There is no doubt that the drivers of change are to be found in this room. You have my full support as Science Minister to research, innovate and help our economy grow.

Closed consultation: Disabled students in higher education: funding proposals

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 13:00:00 +0000

We want information and evidence to help us direct funding for disabled students in higher education ( HE ) more effectively. We want to balance the support available for all disabled students from HE providers, and that available from Disabled Students’ Allowances ( DSAs ).

The consultation is relevant to:

HE providers
disabled HE students (current and prospective)
stakeholders working with disabled students in HE or wishing to enter HE
disability charities
advocacy organisations working with disabled people
DSAs assessment centres
non-medical help suppliers

The questions only relate to HE students entitled to receive support from Student Finance England.

Speech: Teaching at the heart of the system

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 09:49:00 +0000

Thank you to Universities UK ( UUK ) for hosting us today.

In my first speech on universities a month ago, I addressed the subject of international education.

I am proud of the sector’s international standing and reputation around the world.

Today, I want to reflect further on what underpins this excellence, and what more we can do to enhance it.

At the root of that success is the autonomy and academic freedom that enables us to attract brilliant people to work in and run our universities and lead our sectoral bodies.

I’d like to congratulate Nicola Dandridge for her recent CBE and thank outgoing UUK President, Chris Snowden, for his excellent service.

I would also like to congratulate Dame Julia Goodfellow on taking over the UUK Presidency – the first woman to hold the post ever, I believe (in around 100 years of the existence of UUK and its predecessor body).

Success of the sector

The higher education sector can be proud of its success over the last 5 years and I want to pay tribute to my colleagues David Willetts and Greg Clark for their part in the reforms that have helped sustain the high esteem in which it is held around the world.

We have seen:

a transformed financial situation; as the OECD says, we are one of the only countries in the world to have found a way of sustainably funding higher education
we have seen record numbers of young people entering higher education, including record numbers from disadvantaged backgrounds
and we have seen record numbers of graduates in work; the recent Graduate Labour Market statistics showed the highest employment rate for working age graduates since 2007 (at 87.5%)
through all this, the UK has retained its place as a world leader in HE , with 4 universities in the global top 10, and as number one in the world for the impact of our research

Unfinished business

It’s a great success story, but there is unfinished business and, in the coming months, my focus will be on implementing 3 key manifesto pledges, so that we consolidate and build on these achievements:

firstly, lifting the cap on student numbers and widening participation, so that we remove barriers to ambition and meet the PM’s commitment to double the proportion of disadvantaged young people entering higher education by 2020 from 2009 levels
secondly, delivering a teaching excellence framework that creates incentives for universities to devote as much attention to the quality of teaching as fee-paying students and prospective employers have a right to expect
thirdly, driving value for money both for students investing in their education, and taxpayers underwriting the system, so that we ensure the continuing success and stability of these reforms

Taking these points in reverse order.

Meeting value for money expectations

Around now, the first cohort of students to enter under the 2012 reforms is preparing to enter the labour market.

They have been working hard for their final exams and made a significant investment in higher education.

They are looking critically at what they get for that investment, and so must we, as a government, on behalf of taxpayers.

I am concerned that recent surveys – the HEPI-HEA Student Academic Experience Survey, as well as a BBC/ComRes poll – showed that only around half of students felt their course had provided good value for money.

All of us need to reflect on this and on what we can do to address such unease.

More informed choices

Thanks to the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act passed in March, we can now start to assess the employment and earnings returns to education by matching Department for Business, Innovation and Skills ( BIS ) and Department for Education ( DfE ) education data with HMRC employment and income data and Department for Work and Pensions ( DWP ) benefits data.

Information of this sort will be incredibly useful for young people choosing courses or jobs that are most suitable for them. It will also enable education providers to assess their effectiveness in delivering positive labour market outcomes for their students.

I am also pleased to see the piloting of new National Student Survey questions that measure the engagement of students with their course, staff and fellow students.

This was shown in the US to be a good proxy for the value add of a university in terms of ‘learning gain’ - the improvement in knowledge, skills and work-readiness that students demonstrate over time.

While independent learning is vital, universities must get used to providing clearer information about how many hours students will spend in lectures, seminars and tutorials, and who will deliver the teaching.

Indeed the Competition and Markets Authority have advised higher education providers that information should be available to prospective students to meet the requirements of consumer law.

I know this is already on the sector’s agenda. I will continue to push for more data to be made available, including for alternative providers.

A Higher Education Policy Institute ( Hepi ) survey suggests as many as three-quarters of undergraduates want more information about where their fees go – and I sympathise with that.

Such transparency looks to me like an essential way of addressing value for money concerns.

More competition

More competition will also be central to our efforts to drive up standards. In the last 3 years, we have seen more universities created than at any time since the 1992 expansion.

We are committed to promoting high quality market entry, whilst at the same time ensuring a regulatory regime which guards against poor quality provision.

More competition and more informed choice will help drive up value for money for both students and taxpayers.

Graduate premium

The graduate earnings premium is an important measure of the value universities add and of the greater productivity of those with skills acquired in higher education.

Of course, many graduates will consciously choose to go into occupations that do not maximise their incomes – we must remember that education is about more than just wage returns.

Indeed, that is the reason we have a progressive repayment system for student loans.

But it is also important to remember that higher lifetime graduate earnings provide benefits to society – including higher tax revenues and faster and fuller repayment of student loans.

Evidence of a decline in the graduate earnings premium is therefore a concern as we look to drive up productivity in the economy, secure our public finances and ensure our higher education system continues to be funded in a sustainable way.

Between 2006 and 2015, the graduate earnings premium decreased from around 55% higher to around 45% higher than the earnings of non-graduates, with graduates now earning on average £31k and non-graduates £22,000.

There is still a considerable benefit – but we cannot be complacent and must analyse why the premium employers pay for graduates is falling at a time when graduate-level skills are in growing demand.

Course choice and curriculum design

An important part of the answer is that we are not yet rising to the challenge of ensuring that enough young people are choosing courses where there are skills shortages and strong employer demand – notably in science, technology, engineering and mathematics ( STEM ).

Nor are we doing enough to ensure that all students emerge from university prepared for work.

Last year’s CBI /Pearson Education and Skills survey suggested that 47% of employers felt universities should do more to help students become job-ready.

Government, business and the university sector need to come together to address this mismatch between supply and demand in the graduate labour market.

Businesses should not just be seen as customers of universities, recruiting the graduates they educate or buying research expertise, but as active partners.

Universities need to develop business-outreach into a core function that has influence over curriculum design.

Closer partnership between universities and business will help us tackle the misguided view that ‘more means worse’ and ensure that the investment both students and taxpayers make in higher education provides visible returns.

Teaching Excellence Framework ( TEF )

Above all, to meet students’ high expectations of their university years and to deliver the skills our economy needs, we need a renewed focus on teaching.

This is vital unfinished business from the reforms of the last Parliament.

As David Willetts himself acknowledged in a recent interview with the Times Higher Education; “teaching has been by far the weakest aspect of English higher education”.

This must change.

There must be recognition of excellent teaching – and clear incentives to make ‘good’ teaching even better.

Some rebalancing of the pull between teaching and research is undoubtedly required.

It is striking that while we have a set of measures to reward high quality research, backed by substantial funding (the Research Excellence Framework), there is nothing equivalent to drive up standards in teaching.

That is why my priority as Universities Minister will be to make sure students get the teaching they deserve and employers get graduates with the skills they need by introducing the Teaching Excellence Framework we promised in our manifesto.

Aims for the TEF

My aims for the TEF are:

to ensure all students receive an excellent teaching experience that encourages original thinking, drives up engagement and prepares them for the world of work
to build a culture where teaching has equal status with research, with great teachers enjoying the same professional recognition and opportunities for career and pay progression as great researchers
to stimulate a diverse HE market and provide students with the information they need to judge teaching quality – in the same way they can already compare a faculty’s research rating
to recognise those institutions that do the most to welcome students from a range of backgrounds and support their retention and progression to further study or a graduate job

I expect the TEF to include a clear set of outcome-focused criteria and metrics. This should be underpinned by an external assessment process undertaken by an independent quality body from within the existing landscape.

Believe me, I have no intention of replicating the individual and institutional burdens of the REF . I am clear that any external review must be proportionate and light touch, not big, bossy and bureaucratic.

I want to work with you all, as well as with the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Quality Assurance Agency, to design a framework that has widespread support and works for the sector, as well as students and employers and taxpayers.

This is not happening in isolation. It goes with the grain of our reforms since 2010 and aims to accelerate positive changes already underway in the sector.

We will be consulting widely and I am not pre-empting what any of the incentives might look like. I am keen to hear your views ahead of a green paper, which the Department of Business, Innovation and SkiIls plans to publish in the autumn.

Maintaining the value of our degrees

One of the things I want to focus on in the green paper is how the TEF can help improve the information that matters most for graduates and employers: the degree classification.

Here we face a significant challenge.

The UK’s standard model of classes of honours is on its own no longer capable of providing the recognition hardworking students deserve and the information employers require.

Students across the country have just finished their exams and are looking for good graduate jobs. Last week’s High Fliers survey reminded us that the class of 2015 is more career-oriented than ever before.

They rightly want hard work at university to be recognised and for their degree to be a currency that carries prestige and holds its value. At the same time, businesses need a degree classification system that will help them identify the best applicants for their firms.

I know the sector is starting to tackle this need for richer information through the Higher Education Achievement Report and this is a valuable development, but this work needs greater urgency.

Let me explain why:

There has been a significant increase in the proportion of people receiving firsts and 2:1 degrees.

To the extent this expansion in the number of firsts and 2:1s is to do with rising levels of attainment and hard work, I applaud it.

But I suspect I am not alone in worrying that less benign forces are at work with the potential to damage the UK higher education brand.

On the face of it, the facts are certainly startling.

There has been a 300% increase in the percentage of firsts since the 1990s.

Over 70% of graduates now get a First or 2:1 – up by 7 percentage points in the past 5 years. And compared to just 47% in the mid-1990s.

In 2013 to 14, over 50% of students were awarded an upper second, suggesting that this grade band not only disguises considerable variation in attainment, but also permits some to coast.

The Higher Education Academy found that nearly half of institutions had changed their degree algorithms to; “ensure that their students were not disadvantaged compared to those in other institutions”.

The Teaching Excellence Framework we will introduce will include incentives for the sector to tackle degree inflation and ensure that hard-won qualifications hold their value.

I want the green paper to look at the role that external examiners play in underpinning standards and ensuring our grading system provides a clearer, more comparable picture of student attainment.

Stronger student engagement

I also want to make sure that the Teaching Excellence Framework encourages universities to adopt a grading system that does more to motivate and engage students throughout their course.

The familiar pattern of a First, 2:1 and 2:2, Third is widely recognised.

But providing extra granularity through a grade point average ( GPA ) – a 13 point scale developed by the sector – will encourage consistent effort, make it less easy to coast within the 2:1 band and give employers more information about candidates within that classification.

It is vital that we continue to drive up student engagement.

Students are working harder than before and that is a welcome trend, which we want to support through the Teaching Excellence Framework.

But many full time students are still not being sufficiently stretched.

In the most recent Student Academic Experience Survey, the total weekly workload reported by students averages 30.5 hours, including 14 hours of independent study, and varies greatly by subject.

The reported weekly workload on courses such as Mass Communications and Documentation is as little as 22 hours.

Students are telling us in surveys that they know they would do better by investing more time in their studies.

As a more finely-calibrated long-run batting average, GPA should drive greater student engagement than our present system, which, notwithstanding more summative coursework, in many ways can still look like a snapshot performance measure.

I know Sir Robert Burgess, chair of the Grade Point Average Advisory Group, has predicted all UK universities will adopt the model by the end of the decade.

I support this goal and want the green paper to examine how the new Teaching Excellence Framework can encourage universities to adopt dual running of the GPA and honours degree system, as recommended in the recent Higher Education Academy report.

Widening participation

My focus has of course been on students and the job market.

But this does not mean we overlook the value of learning for its own sake, or the role of higher education in social mobility.

The 2012 reforms mean that anyone with the ability can now make going to university their goal, a fact underscored by our decision to lift the cap on student numbers altogether from this academic year.

Anyone with potential to benefit from university should not be prevented from going because of their background or ability to pay.

But of course there is still more to do.

The Prime Minister has set an ambitious goal to double the proportion of those from disadvantaged backgrounds progressing into higher education by 2020 (compared with 2009).

I will challenge you to do all you can to reach this target.

That’s why I am delighted that Professor Les Ebdon has agreed to extend his term as director of the Office of Fair Access to help us fulfil a commitment that is central to this One Nation Government’s aim to promote social mobility in this country.

In particular, I want to see more progress being made in the most selective institutions.

Data from UCAS shows the clear progress that the sector has made, and I applaud that.

I want to see more outreach and more innovation in terms of course length and design. Degree Apprenticeships and 2-year courses in particular offer a more accessible route to a higher education and a faster path to productive employment.

We also need to match our efforts on driving up fair access by also ensuring those young people succeed in getting a good qualification and have an opportunity to find a fulfilling career.

I know that this ‘whole student lifecycle’ approach is one that you are taking seriously – and it is embedded in the National Strategy for Access and Student Success.

I expect our new Teaching Excellence Framework to include incentives that reward institutions who do best at retention and progression of disadvantaged students through their college years.

Conclusion

I recognise that this is a challenging agenda and that you are already focused on many of these issues.

We will be working with closely with universities and with the grain of reforms that have put power and choice in the hands of students.

Those institutions that can demonstrate that they excel in teaching and in supporting all students – including those from disadvantaged backgrounds – through university into graduate jobs will reap rewards.

If we can get this right –

on driving value for money for students and taxpayers
on creating incentives to encourage excellent teaching
and on widening participation

– then I’m confident we can together make a world-leading higher education sector greater still.

Speech: Celebrating 60 years of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)

Fri, 19 Jun 2015 08:47:56 +0000

Let me start by congratulating the Institute of Economic Affairs ( IEA ) on its 60th birthday.

We all know how hard it is to get economists to agree on anything.

As President Reagan said, if Trivial Pursuit was designed by economists it would have 100 questions…

…and 3,000 answers.

But I’m sure everyone here tonight agrees that it’s an amazing achievement for a think-tank to reach its diamond jubilee.

For 60 years now you’ve been thinking the unthinkable…

…winning hearts and minds and influencing governments from Westminster to Washington to Warsaw and everywhere in between.

Of course, it could have all been very different.

After leaving the RAF a young Sir Antony Fisher was set on a career in politics.

But Friedrich Hayek told him that if he really wanted to change the world he should forget about becoming an MP…

…and start a think-tank instead.

I don’t know if that means I’m in the wrong job!

But I do know that we should all be very grateful for Hayek’s intervention.

Because the think-tank Sir Antony established, would go on to play a huge and important role in political and economic history.

When I was born, the IEA was already a teenager.

By the time I joined, as a student down in Exeter, it was well into middle age…

…and was probably one of the most influential think-tanks anywhere in the Western World.

The Institute’s work really resonated with me, taking the theories of the economists I admired…

…Hayek, Friedman, and Minford…

…and showing how easily and practically they could be applied in the real world.

It both reflected and deeply influenced my views, helping to develop the economic and political philosophy that guides me to this day.

And its back story spoke to me too, showing that you don’t have to be fabulously wealthy to think capitalism is a good thing.

Like Ralph Harris I’m a working class kid who grew up on an inner-city estate.

Like Ralph Harris I saw first-hand the realities of poverty.

And, like Ralph Harris, I have never been in any doubt that free enterprise is the best way to bring prosperity to as many people as possible.

That the free market can solve not just economic problems, but social ones too.

That was true back when I was a student and it’s true today.

Our economy is growing faster than any of our G7 rivals, and more people are in work than ever before.

But if that success is going to be maintained and built on, we cannot afford to stand still.

We need to increase productivity, drive investment in industry, grow our exports.

Not just to make individuals better off, although that is a noble aim in itself.

But also because a strong economy allows us to protect our most vulnerable citizens.

To pay for the NHS, for our schools and armed forces and police.

To build roads and railways, and to give our young people the skills they need to get on in the modern world.

None of this can be achieved without a strong economy.

And a strong economy will never be delivered by attacking big business, or by endlessly raising taxes, or wrapping innovators up in red tape.

That’s why my Enterprise Bill will free businesses from another £10 billion of needless regulation.

That’s why we’ll keep on cutting taxes.

And that’s why I want Britain to be the best place in the world to start and grow a business.

During the Cold War, the physical bulwark against Communism was provided by the formidable military might of the NATO alliance.

But throughout that time the ideological bulwark, the theoretical and philosophical defence, was brigaded by the likes of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

While our troops and bombs and planes protected the West from the Red Army, in the battle for ideas our generals were Sir Antony, Lord Harris and Arthur Seldon.

Today the Cold War is rapidly becoming a distant memory, consigned to the textbooks of political history.

Most economics students arriving at university this autumn will have been born 8 years after the Berlin Wall fell.

But the work of the IEA is just as important as ever.

Because the free market is the most efficient, most enduring, most effective system ever devised by mankind.

Since the 1970s the number of people in the world living on $1 a day, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by 80%.

That’s the biggest increase in prosperity the world has ever experienced.

And it didn’t happen because of international aid, or thanks to the IMF or World Bank.

It was brought about by the spread of capitalism.

The free market is the greatest force every created for lifting people out of poverty.

But we must not lose sight of the fact that it’s an artificial creation.

It is not the natural order of things.

We have to consciously choose to embrace it, choose to continue its legacy.

President Reagan was talking about democracy when he said that that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.

But his idea – that freedom is not passed on but must be fought for, protected and defended – applies equally to free market.

We neglect it at our peril and if we fail to support it, it could still crumble in the face of countless tiny attacks.

Or, as George W Bush put it in slightly more succinct terms during the global financial crisis: “this sucker could go down”.

If the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, then we will always need the likes of the IEA to be the watchmen for capitalism.

We will always need the heirs of Fisher, Harris and Seldon to make the case for free enterprise, to be its last line of defence and first line of attack.

That is the role the IEA has played for the past 60 years, and you have much to celebrate tonight.

But I’ve always believed that the best birthdays are those that have yet to arrive.

And I know that, in spite of everything it has achieved since 1955, the Institute of Economic Affairs’ best years are still to come.

Speech: Creating jobs and driving growth: 20 years of the Alternative Investment Market

Thu, 18 Jun 2015 12:14:00 +0000

The British economy growing strongly after emerging from a deep recession. A Conservative Prime Minister with a small but workable majority. And the Westminster bubble dominated by talk of Britain’s future in Europe.

Yes, June 1995 was a very different time…

But during that long hot summer the London Stock Exchange changed forever with the arrival of the Alternative Investment Market ( AIM ).

It’s been said that while good companies meet needs, great companies create markets. Over the past 20 years more than 3,000 great companies have done just that, creating, in the AIM , a market that is the envy of the world.

And with AIM -listed companies contributing almost £15 billion to our economy each year, it’s no surprise that the model has been imitated by other exchanges in Europe and beyond.

But the British model will always be the original and best.

And this government will always support innovations like the AIM and the kind of entrepreneurs who make them such a success, many of whom are here with us this evening.

Over the past 20 years, well over £90 billion has been raised by companies listed on the AIM . That’s £90 billion invested in the future of exciting, ambitious businesses. £90 billion that has allowed innovative, growing companies to reach their true potential. And most importantly, £90 billion that has helped create hundreds of thousands of jobs for hardworking people right across the UK.

When the AIM does well, when entrepreneurs do well, the whole country does well. And I’m proud to say that this government has a long record of helping to make that happen.

We’ve changed the rules so that AIM shares can be held in ISAs, and abolished stamp duty on share purchases made on equity growth markets.

The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, introduced in 2012, has already supported more than 2,700 companies, helping them raise almost a quarter of a billion pounds of investment.

We’ve significantly expanded the qualifying limits to attract investment through the Enterprise Investment Scheme and the Venture Capital Trust.

We supported the creation of the £2.5 billion Business Growth Fund, which invested more than £200 million in growth finance last year.

And of course we set up the British Business Bank, which is helping thousands of small, dynamic businesses unlock the finance they need in order to grow and create jobs.

That’s what we’re all about – supporting economic growth and job creation. So far we’re doing pretty well. More people are in work than at any point in British history, our economy is growing faster than any of our major rivals, and our Enterprise Bill will do even more to support British business. It’s due to be published later this year.

But it’s important to remember that the government simply creates the conditions in which private enterprise can thrive. For all the rhetoric you hear from politicians, governments don’t create jobs – businesses create jobs. Entrepreneurs create jobs. YOU create jobs.

Tonight I’m delighted to announce that the LSE Group is launching a new scheme to create high-quality apprenticeships for talented young people with the potential to excel at AIM -listed companies.

Run in partnership with the charity City Gateway, the scheme will bring together the innovative new companies that are the future of British business, and the hardworking young apprentices who are the future of the British workforce.

Because apprenticeships are not some kind of second-best option for working class kids who can’t get in to university. Apprenticeships provide young people with the opportunity to learn on-the-job while earning a proper wage. And they give employers like you the chance to train the skilled, loyal workforce you need in order to compete on the global stage.

Two million apprenticeships were created during the last Parliament. Between now and 2020 we want to see another 3 million starts. The AIM Apprenticeship scheme is exactly the kind of project that will help to make that vision a reality.

It’s a great initiative, and I’d urge everyone here to support City Gateway so it can help as many young people as possible.

We’re gathered here this evening at the home of the Honourable Artillery Company ( HAC ). With former HAC members ranging from Samuel Pepys to Edward Heath, I’m sure this square has seen some interesting sights over the years.

But I doubt any could compare to the spectacle on 15 September 1784, when 200,000 people turned out to watch the start of England’s first-ever manned balloon flight. After running a massive marketing campaign to attract support, an Italian named Vincenzo Lunardi took off from here and floated all the way to Ware in Hertfordshire.

His early efforts helped pave the way for other pioneers who would change the world forever. Because when innovative individuals have the right backing they can achieve incredible things. It was true in Lunardi’s day, and it’s still true more than 2 centuries later.

That’s why the AIM has been such a triumph. It brings together enterprising companies and the financial backers who can propel them on to greater things. For 20 years the AIM has fuelled innovation, driven growth and created jobs.

Congratulations to everyone who has helped make that happen – and here’s to many more years of success.

Speech: Happy customers are good for business

Wed, 17 Jun 2015 15:07:45 +0000

Thank you Pete for that kind introduction, and congratulations to everyone who has won an award so far. I think there are still a few more to come!

When I stopped being Culture Secretary, most of my kids decided that my brief period of being “Cool Dad” was over.

They liked it when I was working with music, film, TV and sport… Just think of the invites I got, which the kids sometimes thought were invites for them, too!

For some reason they don’t find things like local enterprise partnerships and the Enterprise Bill so exciting. And they don’t seem to want a behind the scenes tour of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

The exception is my 14-year-old son, Suli. Because and I promise you this is true, I’m not making it up, for years now his favourite magazine has been Which?.

I’m not quite sure how this came about!

Just last week he was revising for his exams. And when my wife and I said he’d done enough to earn a break, he rushed downstairs and – for fun – started devouring the latest edition.

And people say I’m a bit of a geek!

So I want to start today by saying a really big “thank you” to Peter and everyone at Which?. Firstly for giving Suli such a happy childhood! But also because, for almost 60 years now, you have been helping the British do something that really doesn’t come naturally to us. Complaining.

Let’s face it, British people are terrible at asserting their rights as customers. I think we just find it unbecoming.

So many of us will ‘tut-tut’ and maybe mutter under our breath and even tell our friends how awful our experience was. But we’ll say nothing to the people who are actually responsible, the people in charge.

I only really noticed this when I moved to New York straight after university. I was sat in a diner there, and discovered that even a minor delay in getting your complimentary glass of iced water refilled would prompt a level of outrage that you’d only see in the UK if somebody jumped the bus stop queue, or something.

This isn’t just anecdotal.

A recent survey by U-Switch found that 65% of us regularly experience poor customer service, but only a quarter ever actually raise concerns about it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t do anything in response. The 21st century high street is a very competitive place, there’s no shortage of options for disgruntled customers.

Growing up in my parents’ shop, Kaiza Fashions, I learned from an early age that if we couldn’t give a customer what they wanted when they wanted it they would quite happily walk down the road and go into a rival business. And one more customer for our rivals meant one less customer for Kaiza – something that has a real impact on a small business.

Even the largest employers can’t afford to lose business because of poor service. As Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton put it: “There is only one boss – the customer. And he can fire everyone in the company from the chairman on down simply by taking his business elsewhere.”

In fact when I was a minister at the Treasury I took great pride in helping customers do exactly that, working with banks to create the seven-day switch guarantee. By making it easier for disgruntled customers to leave, the guarantee forced the banks to raise their game.

It’s a lesson that all businesses of any size should learn from. Because the simple truth is that without happy customers there are no businesses. Without customers there are no profits, no exports, no growth.

That’s why the Department for Business could just as easily be called the Department for Customers.

Now Nick Boles is doing a great job on the consumer protection portfolio. But I don’t want you think that our commitment to customer service begins and ends there.

Helping businesses deliver for their customers is at the heart of everything we do in my department, whether it’s helping companies develop novel and new products customers demand, giving employees the skills they need to serve customers better, or tearing up the red tape that all too often makes it harder for customers to do business with you.

Recently I heard about a 9-year-old girl who had gone along to her local bank to open a savings account.

She wanted somewhere to keep her pocket money safe, and her parents wanted her to learn the virtue of saving money rather than spending it. Responsible behaviour that I’m sure we’d all like to encourage.

But before she could open her account, the bank insisted that she watch a video, designed for adults explaining the concept of variable interest rates. She started to fidget when she had to listen to her first-ever initial disclosure statement. And then the bank carefully explained her right to shop elsewhere for buildings and contents insurance, presumably for her wendy house.

Finally the girl who, remember, is only 9 years old – was asked to sign a disclaimer to say she understood that her personal information would be managed in line with the Data Protection Act, that the bank reserved the right to run a credit check on her, and that her savings were protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. But only up to the first £85,000.

Either that last bit was a little unnecessary, or pocket money has gone up a lot since I was a kid!

The poor thing was sent away with 3 separate booklets outlining her account’s terms and conditions. Not surprisingly, when she got home she asked “Mummy do I really have to read all this?” To which of course the answer was “No dear. Nobody ever does”.

Now I’m sure that if I was to name the bank involved, they’d say they’re only doing this in the first place because of government regulations. And I think that’s a very fair point – and it’s something I’m determined to change.

When people talk about tearing up regulations they normally just mean ones that cause trouble for businesses. But I want to cut red tape that ties up customers, too. I don’t want anything to get between you and them. When they choose to spend their money with you, they should be able to do so without government rules getting in the way.

The Enterprise Bill is going to get rid of at least £10 billion of needless red tape. Regulations that do not genuinely serve customer needs, which are bad for business and a barrier to growth.

So if you find that your customers are sinking under the weight of bureaucracy, I want to know about it. If your customers tell you that a wall of Whitehall-mandated terms and conditions are getting in their way, I want you to pass that information on to me. How can we focus on the really important stuff that really matters to your customers? In short, how can we get out of your way and help you do business?

That’s why, when I was in charge of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, I worked with the telecom companies to ensure mobile phone coverage across 90% of the UK.

Now the easy thing for me would have been to force through some new law that simply mandated it. But by sitting down with the operators and letting them take the lead, I was able to negotiate a £5 billion legally binding agreement that delivered for customers without burdening the companies.

Some people believe that I’m completely against regulation and intervention of any kind, that I think businesses should just be left to get on with it. That would not be entirely true.

I’ve always believed that regulation has 2 very simple roles to play. First, it should benefit and protect customers. And second, it should give companies a fair and transparent framework to operate and compete in. And that’s exactly what the new Consumer Rights Act will do.

Developed with help both from businesses and from consumer organisations including Which?, it comes into force in October. And it will require that important terms and conditions are included up front, in plain English. Crucial issues written in legalese and hidden away in the small print won’t be legally binding.

This isn’t about catching businesses out, or creating another set of rules to follow. By guaranteeing plain English and due prominence, the new system will actually help companies. It will focus minds on what really matters and make it easier for you to develop better, clearer terms and conditions.

The new act will also clarify the muddle of statutory rights. It will help employees from the shop floor to the boardroom understand what is expected of them, and it will let customers know the standards they should be demanding and the means by which they can seek redress.

And, bizarre as it sounds, you actually want those individuals to complain when they have a problem. You don’t want them to be terribly British and suffer in silence. If that happens, your service will never improve.

I think it was Bill Gates who said your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. If they tell you what you’re doing wrong, you can do it better.

So we want to get British customers complaining because assertive customers make businesses better. And better businesses grow faster and do more to support the sustainable recovery we’re building in this country.

But I don’t want you to think that building good customer relations begins and ends at the till. Businesses don’t exist in a vacuum. Whether large or small, on the high street or online, businesses are a vital part of the communities they serve. They provide jobs and services, obviously. But they are also uniquely placed to support their communities in many other ways.

Just last week I heard that a company in my Bromsgrove constituency, Hugo Technology, is generously supporting a new local rugby team. But the contribution that business makes doesn’t have to be financial – over the years I’ve seen businesses organising litter patrols, helping with charity fundraising drives, even hosting political hustings.

There’s literally no limit to the ways businesses of all shapes and sizes can give back to their communities. And, as we recover, as a country, from the depths of the record-breaking recession, and the economy continues to grow, your ability to invest in your community grows too.

There’s a moral case for doing this, obviously. But it’s also yet another opportunity to engage with customers, to show that you care about their wider needs. To keep them happy.

That’s what today is all about, and it’s what I’m all about. As Secretary of State, I’ll be doing all I can to help you serve the most important people in any business – the customers. Because happy customers are good for business. And what’s good for business is good for Britain.

Thank you.

Speech: International higher education

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 10:33:57 +0000

Thanks Ciaran for that introduction and for inviting me to open Going Global. It’s a highlight in the annual international education calendar - a pleasure to welcome it back to London in my new role.

As someone lucky enough to do post graduate study in France and Belgium, some 15 and 20 years ago, I’m delighted that more and more UK students are now seizing the chance to broaden their horizons.

When I went off on the ferry to the Université Libre de Bruxelles in the mid-1990s, and a few years later to INSEAD in the forest of Fontainebleau, it was a niche move.

Today, the British Council’s research tells us that over a third of UK students are interested in studying abroad.

And while the increase in the number of those who actually take the leap is encouraging - almost 29,000 students last year – we need to do more.

CBI surveys show our businesses remain unhappy with UK graduates’ overall foreign language abilities and disappointed by their general cultural awareness. We must do more to prepare ourselves for the globalised world.

I welcome the strong demand for the EU ’s Erasmus Programme and for the British Council’s Generation UK Programme, which aims to send up to 80,000 UK students to China and 25,000 students to India by 2020.

We must build on these important programmes, which both increase students’ employability and support the UK’s ties overseas.

A warm welcome to international students

The UK of course values international students who come to this country too. We recognise that competition for the brightest and best students from other countries is intensifying.

We will continue to ensure that our excellent education system remains a magnet for brilliant minds.

Today, we have more than 435,000 international higher education ( HE ) students, which means that nearly 1 in 5 students in our university population is from overseas – and over in 4 in our capital city.

They come for the world class quality of our education and the opportunities for research. We have more top ranking universities in London than in any other city in the world. With 4 universities in the global top 10, we rank second only to the US.

Our research base is world leading, our universities are world-class, we develop and attract the world’s brightest minds and we are second in the world when ranked by Nobel prizes.

The benefits to the UK

International students enrich this offering.

They contribute to our research capacity. And the £3.9 billion they bring in tuition fees helps our universities invest in first class facilities and provision. International students also stimulate demand for courses where domestic demand alone can be insufficient to sustain them, ensuring that a wider range of courses are available for all students and that some strategically important courses remain viable.

In particular, they help us maintain our first class STEM provision: 47% of post-graduate level students in subjects such as engineering and technology are from non- EU countries.

International students also provide a cultural cross-fertilisation that benefits everyone. In a recent survey by the Higher Education Policy Institute and Kaplan, 87% of university applicants said studying alongside international students would give them a better world view and 85% thought it would prepare them for working in a global environment.

Tapping top-flight student talent globally will not just mean the UK gains in terms of innovation, research and a broader science and skills base. Greater exchange of students now will mean stronger relationships later.

Today’s international students are tomorrow’s world leaders. They take friendships and loyalties home with them that later become trade links, cultural bonds and diplomatic ties. Nearly 80% of students anticipate developing professional links with the UK.

The immediate economic benefits from international students are real too - for every 100 non- EU students, 45 full time equivalent jobs are created and £4.6 million generated in UK businesses – and they are felt right across the UK.

London is the most popular destination in the world for overseas students, but 23% of non- EU students are in the North of England, 16% in the Midlands and 9% in Scotland.

These benefits are reflected in public attitudes. A number of polls, most recently one by YouGov for The Times, show the great majority of the British public (72% in this case) think we should have the current number of international students or more. Not fewer.

A clear message from the Prime Minister

I want students from across the world to understand our commitment:

We will roll out the red carpet to the brightest and best, to the talented workers and brilliant students that help Britain’s success.

There is no cap on the number of overseas students that can come to study at our universities.

That’s not just me, but the Prime Minister, speaking just a few days ago.

Sometimes people worry that they are taking places from British students. There used to be a limit on the number of British students that government would fund.

But we have a sustainable graduate repayment scheme in place, and we are in a position to remove limits on the number of UK students that publicly-funded universities can recruit, lifting the cap on aspiration.

No longer will there be young people eager to go to university, young people that universities wanted to teach, who cannot get places because of a limit imposed by Whitehall.

Genuine students

Government’s welcome to international students is genuine. But it is to genuine students.

It is right that we are clamping down on fraudulent applications and bogus colleges – we have stopped over 870 of these institutions from recruiting international students since 2010 and will take all steps necessary to protect international students from rogue providers and dodgy operators.

That’s why I can announce today (1 June 2015) that we have taken further action by appointing Graduate Prospects to help us expose unscrupulous organisations and remove misleading websites wherever they make an appearance.

Such changes are in the interests of all legitimate providers because they protect the reputation of the UK as a provider of high-quality education.

It is also right that we have reformed the student visa system to ensure that students who are not genuine cannot abuse the system. And we will take proportionate action to deal with overstaying wherever our new system of exit checks shows it to be an issue.

Strengthening our HE system

The best way to attract good quality students, from all over the world, is to maintain our world class higher education sector. And this we have.

But we are not resting on our laurels. We have introduced important reforms to our higher education system from 2012.

The OECD considers us to be one of the few countries in the world to have established a sustainable approach to higher education funding.

Increasing international student recruitment

So we have a strong offering to the world, which explains why we are currently the second most popular destination for international study, after the USA.

But I am concerned that some feel the UK does not welcome students as warmly as we once did and that there has been a decline of student numbers from some of our key partners, most notably India.

It is a personal aim of mine to overcome misconceptions about the UK in such important countries.

Data tells a good tale. Once here, Indian students’ satisfaction rate is 90%. And most of those say they would recommend their universities to others.

We will engage and explain. We will make clear that there is no cap on the number of students who can come to study in the UK and no intention to introduce one.

Nor is there any cap on the number of former students who can stay on to work - as long as they have a graduate job.

Across all our international education activity, we have an ambition to grow.

We are committed to increasing education exports from £18 billion in 2012 to £30 billion by 2020. We will not achieve that goal unless we continue to attract the brightest and best from around the world.

We are expanding our scholarship programmes. Last year we tripled funding for Chevening scholarships. This year the government will spend over £70m on scholarships in the Chevening, Commomwealth and Marshall schemes.

Enabling over 2500 scholarships and support for 60,000 alumni, these schemes help forge life-long links between our nations.

Conclusion

The breadth of attendance today is testament to the importance we all attach to international opportunities.

Global education leads to wealth, health and mutual understanding. It builds foundations for cultural and economic enrichment.

Going Global provides an ideal forum to discuss how we can make our ambitions a reality and I wish you all the very best for a successful conference.

Speech: Support for small business: government plans

Tue, 19 May 2015 13:23:56 +0000

I’m delighted to be back in my home town of Bristol.

And to be here at Engine Shed – a place that captures everything that’s great about this city…

…past, present and future.

We’re in part of the original Temple Meads train station, designed by Brunel.

Today – thanks to Bristol University and the city council – there are promising start-ups here.

There are app developers and apprentices in residence – the business creators and skilled workers of the future. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some fantastic examples already this morning.

It’s the perfect spot for me to talk about the government’s plans for business…

…in the city where I learned almost every important thing about business.

The business in question was beneath the flat on Stapleton Road – which I shared with my parents and 4 brothers.

It was a clothes shop…

…the basis of my deep knowledge of ladies’ clothing.

I’m certain no male MP knows more about womenswear. At least, I think that’s true.

But, most important, it was the culmination of my parents’ ambitions.

They came to this country in 1964 with dreams of a better life.

My dad started off working in a cotton mill.

Then he drove buses.

And, at weekends, he ran a clothing stall at the local market.

As trade grew, he got extra pitches – in Rochdale, Manchester and Liverpool.

Meanwhile my mum was back at home – looking after us and making clothes for the stall.

The sound of my childhood was her Singer sewing machine hammering away in the background.

Later, we got the shop on Stapleton Road.

Therein lay the soul of my family.

It was a 24/7 concern.

We all mucked in. I remember, aged 10, properly helping Dad.

Wearing the moneybelt, helping the customers, being in control.

Our fortunes, our happiness – they fluctuated with the day’s takings.

It instilled in me an unwavering belief in enterprise, opportunity and reward for hard work.

Above all, I know what it’s like to run a small business.

That’s why I’m here today to talk about what this government will do to support you.

I’m here to expand on what David Cameron said while visiting the Tetley factory in Stockton-on-Tees last week.

To add another tea bag to the pot.

The Prime Minister said this would be a government delivering for working people.

For hardworking taxpayers.

For men and women giving them the dignity of a job and the pride of a pay check.

He promised we would train 3 million more apprentices.

Improve childcare for people who want to work, or work longer.

And cut taxes.

The momentum we’ve gained over the last 5 years is for all to see.

2.2 million private sector jobs created since 2010…

…meaning we now have in the UK record employment.

750,000 more businesses created since 2010.

Almost 28,000 recipients of start-up loans…

…realising the dream of running and owning a business…

…in places like Bristol.

Make no mistake.

Government isn’t responsible for this entrepreneurial boom.

That’s down to individuals alone.

People with the guts and gumption to risk everything on starting something from scratch.

Meaning parents can bring home a family wage.

Putting communities back to work locally.

Planting the seeds of regional recovery and economic recovery.

…the strongest in the G7, the healthiest in Europe.

Thanks to them – thanks to you – Britain can look forward with greater confidence.

Yes, Britain is a nation of shopkeepers…

…of plumbers and hairdressers, florists and café owners.

Our great nation – together, strong, on the road to prosperity, as one.

And we’ve been on the side of business.

We cut corporation tax so the UK rate is now the lowest in the western world.

We cut national insurance contributions.

We cut the cost of regulation on UK business by some £10 billion.

And by getting on top of the deficit, we helped keep interest rates and funding rates low.

During the election, we promised to do more for business. Much more.

As one of our first acts, we’re introducing the enterprise bill.

Some people might know my love of Star Trek.

I wanted to call it the Starship Enterprise Bill, but the Prime Minister wasn’t convinced.

First and foremost, it will serve the interests of small business.

Second, it will simplify and clarify the business environment in this country.

And third, it will focus on jobs…

…so employers can create those additional 2 million jobs

…and their focus on growth isn’t obstructed by disproportionate industrial action.

So let me describe the next steps on deregulation – on paring back bureaucracy.

The manifesto promises a further £10 billion of cuts in red tape over the coming Parliament.

This £10 billion is going to be harder to slash than the previous £10 billion.

Recent reforms have already started to make a big difference.

Simpler audits for small business.

Less bureaucracy for house builders and developers.

Fewer employment disputes reaching costly tribunals.

Car mechanics and valets no longer have to do training that’s only useful to lorry drivers.

Child-minders no longer have to self-register as a food business.

Hundreds of live music and community events now exempted from entertainment licensing.

Thousands of regular businesses no longer face health and safety inspections.

And there’s less of the stuff that sometimes invites utter derision.

So no more slaps on the wrist for no-smoking signs in the wrong size or in the wrong place.

No need anymore to report any sightings of grey squirrels on your property.

If you leave your sandwich on the bus, the bus company no longer needs to hold on to it for 48 hours before putting it in the bin.

And, come Christmas, you can buy a box of crackers without having achieved the age of consent.

We already have the lowest burden of regulation in the G7.

But now we’re going to tackle European regulation head on…

…pressing EU institutions to reduce needless burdens on business…

…ensuring we implement EU law in a way that doesn’t put UK business at a competitive disadvantage.

Over the next 5 years, we’ll build on the success of ‘One in, two out’ to put a strict brake on new regs.

For the first time, the actions of regulators will be counted towards achieving the overall £10 billion in cuts.

This will be the first time in modern history that government has successively reduced red tape and continued with reductions in the next parliament.

And business will be our partner…

…giving us the evidence we need to roll back the state.

One crucial aspect of this roll back will be the extension of the rule that is known as Primary Authority.

Primary Authority allows a business to get advice on regulation from a single local council.

This advice must then be respected by all other local councils…

…reducing the time and cost to businesses of having to obey multiple masters.

When Primary Authority came in, the purpose was to help larger firms trading nationwide.

But it was so successful that we opened it to small business in 2013.

Today, more than two-thirds of the businesses taking advantage of Primary Authority are small businesses.

It frees them from inconsistent and confusing red tape.

It reduces their operational costs, and allows them to focus on expansion.

Butchers’ shops, convenience stores, restaurants, manufacturers.

Thanks to Primary Authority, cheese makers don’t have to display their cheddar on wooden boards in one place and on steel platters in another.

Yet only a tiny fraction of small businesses who could benefit are actually doing so.

So we’re going to simplify Primary Authority itself…

…making it far easier for small businesses to access the scheme.

And we’re going to extend its reach.

There’s one more area I wish to cover this morning.

It’s a subject that’s exercised me for some time.

There’s a situation familiar to small business owners up and down the country.

A letter turns up from a larger customer changing payment terms…

…or charging them to remain a supplier…

…and in some cases even deducting that charge on the spot against payment owed.

This pattern of behaviour is an outrage.

It’s bullying – pure and simple.

In 2008, late payment alone cost British business £19 billion.

This year, that’s set to exceed £40 billion.

The average amount owed to a small business is more than £30,000.

You know as well as I what figures like that can do to the cash flow of small businesses.

It’s enough to force a company into insolvency.

We’ve not been blind to these issues.

During the last Parliament, we introduced legislation requiring the UK’s largest companies to report on their payment practices.

That’s going to shine a light on poor performance when it comes into effect next April.

Recent U-turns show that public scrutiny can make big firms mend their ways.

We also strengthened the Prompt Payment Code to introduce a maximum 60 day payment term…

…and promote 30 days as the norm.

Government has rightly been leading by example.

We pay our suppliers within 30 days.

We’ve brought in measures requiring all public sector contracts to pay out within 30 days…

…all the way down the supply chain.

Now, we’re going to widen the powers for representative bodies to act on behalf of their members to challenge grossly unfair payment terms.

There’ll be a consultation on this later this year.

And we will fulfil the manifesto pledge to set up a Small Business Conciliation Service…

…to help small businesses settle their problems with large corporations.

The purpose is to avoid expensive legal costs and maintain business relationships by reaching mutually satisfactory agreements.

This model has worked in Australia.

We will explore it, and other models, and find what works best here in the UK.

Now this isn’t the sum total of what we’re planning to do.

Far from it.

We’re going to review business rates.

From April next year, no employer will pay national insurance for apprentices under 25.

Some of this action will require legislation and will be announced in the Queen’s speech. Some won’t need new legislation.

Either way, my message to you is clear.

If you believe in the values of hard work and enterprise, then we think along exactly the same lines.

If you’re behind a shop counter, behind the wheel of the van, behind a new invention…

…then we are right behind you.

If you’re striving to do what my parents did a generation ago – here in Bristol or anywhere else in Britain…

…build a business, create jobs, improve the prospects of your children…

…then you have my utmost respect, and you will have my total support.

Closed consultation: Postgraduate study: student loans and other support

Wed, 25 Mar 2015 10:30:00 +0000

We want to know your views on a proposed loan system for postgraduate taught master’s students. Under the scheme, anyone under 30 who is eligible and accepted to study will be able to apply for a loan of up to £10,000.

The evidence and responses will inform the design and final terms of the proposed loan scheme.

We are also seeking views and evidence on how we can improve support for postgraduate research students.

Speech: Speech given at BAE Systems by Prime Minister David Cameron

Thu, 12 Mar 2015 18:00:00 +0000

It’s a huge privilege to be here today, and I want to start by congratulating BAE for taking on 800 apprentices this year. That is a record in your company’s history. I think it’s a really great achievement. It’s going to be great for the people involved but it’s also really, really important and good for our country.

And I want to say, before I really start, just when I look at this company and what you do, and I have the huge privilege of being Prime Minister and seeing what you do, I think you should be incredibly proud of what this company does. Right now, you are building some of the biggest warships the Royal Navy has ever had, including the 2 aircraft carriers. You’re launching submarines from Barrow that are some of the most advanced and silent and brilliant anywhere in the world, that enable us to keep our country safe. Here you’re making the Typhoon, an aircraft that has proved itself again and again in the skies over Libya, over Iraq, over the skies of our own country, and I get to see that first-hand. So this is a brilliant manufacturing technology and engineering business, and you should be really proud of what you do.

Before taking your questions – and that is what today’s about, your questions and I will try and answer them – I just wanted to make 3 points. The first is that we have a plan in our country, an economic plan, and the plan is working. It’s a plan about getting the country back to work. It’s a plan about getting our economy growing. It’s a plan about getting our deficit and our debts under control and it’s a plan about rebalancing our economy between south and north so we have a genuinely balanced economy, not so reliant on finance and services, but also reliant on manufacturing and technology.

Now, I can’t claim that in the last 5 years we’ve solved all those country’s problems – that would be wrong – but we have created 1,000 new jobs every day. We are now the fastest growing major economy in the Western world. We got the deficit down by half as a share of our economy, and jobs and livelihoods are growing in every part of the country, not just the south. Indeed, there have been more apprentices created in the north west, and, over the last year, the claimant count has fallen faster in the north west than anywhere else in the country. So we got a plan. The plan is working. We should stick to the plan.

Second point is that BAE Systems is actually a key part of that plan. I say we need to train more young people and you are investing in apprentices. I say we need to export more to other parts of the world and you are blazing a trail with your exports up over the last 5 years, and I believe more to come. I believe we need to rebalance this economy between south and north, between finance and manufacturing, and that’s exactly what you’re doing with your training, with your investment and with your future plans. So you’re a key part of the plan that is working that’s creating a stronger economy.

But the third thing I wanted to say is I want us, as a country, to be more ambitious, and more ambitious in a couple of really important regards. Yes, we’ve got more people in work in our country than ever before but we should be aiming for full employment, for anyone who wants a job, should be able to get a job. We don’t have that situation yet but if we stick to the plan, we keep investing, we keep growing, we can get there.

But I also want us to be more ambitious – even more ambitious on apprenticeships. We created 2 million in this Parliament. [Political content removed]

And there’s a new way that I’m announcing today that I want us to be even more ambitious. And that is I think that when young people leave school, they should either be going into an apprenticeship – as many of you have done – or going on to university to study a degree. That’s the aim. Everyone should have 1 of those 2 opportunities. So increasing apprenticeships but we’re also uncapping the number of university places. And today I can announce a new idea, a new scheme which is actually to bring the two together. To have a degree apprenticeship, so, as you leave school at 18, you would become an apprentice and you would start studying for your degree at the same time. Your fees at university would be paid for by a combination of the government support and the company that would be backing you.

Now I think this is really exciting because, of course, today you can do a degree and then you can do an apprenticeship. Or you can do an apprenticeship and then you can do a degree. But bringing the two together and being able to do the two at the same time, earning while you are learning, I think is really exciting. I think it will be very good for the young people involved because you get a degree, you get the skills without having to pay the fees; you’re earning while you’re learning.

It’s good for the companies because I think companies are keen to get hold of talented young people and train them up, and many can’t manage to attract the best graduates but under this scheme they’ll be able to get them, train them and work with them before they become graduates. And it will be good for our country because the basic truth is this: we are in a global race, global competition with other countries and we’ll win if we have the most skilled, most trained, most motivated workforce in the world. And that is the vision that we should have.

So I wanted to make that announcement today about being ambitious: ambitious for full employment, ambitious for more apprenticeships and ambitious for degree apprenticeships, the new scheme announced today.

That was what I wanted to say. Thank you for the welcome. Congratulations on appointing 800 apprentices this year. Thanks for what you’re doing, building these extraordinary aircraft and all the other work across BAE Systems. And with that, who wants to give me the first question.

Question

What will you do to ensure that the aerospace industry in the north west is not only secure but grows?

Prime Minister

What will I do to keep it growing? Well, the first thing I can do is to carry on in the job that I have. I’m Prime Minister but I’m also – I joke with Ian – I’m one of your unpaid sales staff. I like to get out around the world and encourage people, our partners and our allies, to buy the great equipment that we make.

And I want to make this point quite frankly. No one should be embarrassed or worried by the fact that we make defence equipment and we sell it to our allies around the world. It is an absolutely legitimate business. And I tell you why it is legitimate, because sometimes people forget this. We have a right in our country to self-defence, don’t we? We can invest in our defence industries and in our armed forces to defend ourselves. Other countries have that right too and you can’t expect every country to produce every last piece of equipment that is necessary for their defence. So we have one of the most tightly-controlled and licensed defence sales businesses in the world but it is a legitimate business. [Political content removed] So get out there and promote the great kit that we’ve got.

Second of all, the apprenticeship scheme, the skills, is absolutely essential. But third, and perhaps most crucially, is that people will only believe that we have great equipment if we are investing in it ourselves. And so I have said that the £16 billion that we spend every year on defence equipment, we are committed to that for 10 years. So you have a £160 billion defence equipment budget that will go up in real terms each year so we can plan for the future because it’s no good if you chop and change your defence equipment all the time. We need to know that we can afford those aircraft carriers, those Type 26 frigates, those submarines that you’re building at Barrow-in-Furness. We need to know that the money is there. So the equipment budget is sacrosanct, is protected, and so I think the combination of the equipment budget, the skills we’re investing in, the work we do with our allies overseas, I think there’s a very bright future for aerospace. We’re the number 2 in the world after the United States, and, I think, if we go on doing those things, there’s no reason why we can’t keep that position for the future.

Question

Hi, what I wanted to know is what kind of message would you give to young people who may not utilise their vote in the general election?

Prime Minister

What I would say to everyone, please vote, even if you’re not going to vote for me. Vote because it is important. There are people all over the world who, you know, would love to be able vote and people who have died for the right to vote. And so I would say, if only for that reason, get out and vote and make your choice and read up about what the different politics and policies and parties are.

But I would also challenge the whole kind of Russell Brand nonsense about voting doesn’t matter or doesn’t make any difference. I think he’s completely wrong. It does make a difference. You know, you might agree with me, or you might agree with the other guy, but we have very different ideas about the future of the country. [Political content removed] I’ve got a vision for the future of the country. Now his vision’s different. So don’t let anyone say there aren’t differences between the politicians. There are. You choose.

Final point I’d make – odd one maybe for a Prime Minister to make. One of the great things about voting is you can get rid of people you don’t like. In our system, you know, whether it’s your local council, whether it is your Prime Minister, your Member of Parliament, you can chuck them out, literally. You know, if you vote against me on 8 May, I’ll be driving a removal van up Downing Street and packing up and going. That’s the way it works. It’s incredibly valuable. [Political content removed] But it is a really powerful thing so don’t let anyone tell you voting doesn’t matter. It does. It’s a privilege. It’s not compulsory – we shouldn’t do that – but it’s a privilege and you should make the most of it.

Question

Hi, my question is to you is what are we going to do about the Russian Bears invading our airspace?

Prime Minister

Right, okay. Good point because, of course, when these Russian aircraft fly close to British airspace, as they have done on several occasions this year, 1 of these or 2 of these fantastic Typhoon aircraft are immediately up in the air and escorting those aircraft away from British airspace, and so it’s a reminder of just how essential the Typhoons that you build are to our air defences.

What are we going to do about it? Well first of all, I think we should recognise that the Russians are probably trying to make some sort of point here. They’re showing off their capabilities. We shouldn’t overreact because these planes haven’t actually come into our sovereign airspace. They’ve been flying around it. But we should keep our defences strong. We should make sure we can scramble these Typhoons at a moment’s notice and escort them away from any danger. So keep our defences strong, make clear to the Russians that they might be trying to make some sort of point, but frankly we’re not very impressed by it. And make sure that we have the capabilities to keep our air defences strong, which we do.

And these are extraordinarily capable aircraft, and I know that because when aircraft fly into a British sovereign airspace that we don’t know about, I know exactly how fast these things can get up in the air and get alongside any aircraft, whether it is rogue or unknown or whatever, and how quickly we can take action. So we should be very proud of the capabilities we’ve got right here.

Question

Do you believe that research is important, not only to manned but unmanned aircraft for us to keep in our – keep our level in this year – in this – in the country and in the world?

Prime Minister

I think this is a really important point because the truth is that the next platforms are likely to be more unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs. And if you are going to be a front rank defence player, you’ve always got to be thinking of the next development. So let’s be incredibly proud of the Typhoon. It’s a world-beating aircraft. I think you’ve got forward orders of some 370 and hopefully will have some more as we show it off around the world, how capable it is.

But we should be thinking of the next step, and the next steps are even more stealthy aircraft, more unmanned aerial aircraft, and for that what we should be doing is working out who to partner with so that we can jointly invest in the research and development, but make sure there’s a really big British footprint involved in it. And so I signed something with the French called the Lancaster House Agreement, and I think France and Britain, as the 2 major military players in Europe, I think there’s a real opportunity for us to work together on this future technology.

There’s vital work you’re doing here, there’s a commitment from the government to the research and development, there’s a knowledge that future aircraft are quite likely to be unmanned. I wouldn’t say the age of the piloted fighter jet is over, not least because of course we’ve got the Joint Strike Fighter coming up next, which many of you will be working on. But clearly, more unmanned aircraft drones, ISTAR, intelligence gathering aircraft – these are going to be a vital part of the future and we have to be doing the research now, otherwise we’ll be left behind.

And this leads to a really important point that sometimes I think people don’t get about defence. Your defence budget – it’s no good if you just keep it where it is and keep the capabilities that you have. You have to keep thinking to the future: what is it we’re going to need? And I can tell you, as Prime Minister, when we’re thinking about how do we help the Nigerians rescue the Chibok girls, or how do we try and help recover a hostage on the other side of the world, or how do we help our allies in Iraq and Syria to deal with terrorists on the ground, more and more what we need is intelligence, surveillance, information gathering, we need forces that are very mobile. So if you just stick with what you’ve got – if we stick with, you know, battle tanks rather than drones, we’d be making the wrong decision. Of course you need both, but the job of government is to get the balance right, and the balance needs to shift more in favour of research development and the future capabilities because otherwise we won’t be able to intervene in the ways that keep our country and our people safe.

Question

Hi. My question is, you said this company is a key part to your plan, but I’m guessing that means the Successor Programme as well, and I was just wondering what you’re doing to sway the voters who are against the Trident replacement.

Prime Minister

Okay, very good point, Trident replacement. Well, first of all, thank you for what you’re doing at Barrow with the hunter-killer submarines. They’re absolutely vital. But we must, in my view, replace the Trident submarines and renew our nuclear deterrent.

And it’s worthwhile, for a moment, sort of standing back and considering why this is necessary. It’s obviously a lot of money, it’s a big investment, but I have quite a straightforward view about it, which is we live in a very dangerous world, the nuclear deterrent is our ultimate insurance policy against blackmail, and you’ve got to recognise that there are lots more states in the world that are trying to attain nuclear weapons. So to me, the idea of giving up our nuclear deterrent or weakening our nuclear deterrent at a time of uncertainty and danger, when you’ve got countries trying to acquire nuclear weapons, that is a risk we shouldn’t take.

So if you’ve passed that question, you’ve then got to ask, ‘Well, what does a replacement to Trident look like?’ And I’ve looked at all the arguments, and it seems to me incontrovertible that the best form of deterrents is a submarine-based system that can be continuously at sea, so that it is undetectable and can always give you the assurance that your deterrent is inviolable. So to me, it has to be continuously at sea, submarine-based, and we have to replace it in full. Now, the argument that I will make, and I’ll make it all over the country, is simply that – that, you know, in a dangerous world, you need the ultimate insurance policy and the price you pay for that insurance policy is fair, given that if you gave it up, you’d never be able to regenerate it.

[Political content removed] It also means jobs, it means technology, it means research and development. I think it’d be very difficult to maintain some of our other capabilities if we didn’t have this capability. But those are all secondary arguments, but I will make the first principle argument: Britain’s a front-rank power, we should have that insurance policy, and that means renewing Trident. [Political content removed]

Question

Hi. I’d like to know how your plan for apprenticeships is better than what other parties are offering.

Prime Minister

Well, I think the good thing is that everyone is interested in apprenticeships. Everyone recognises this is a model that works. And what we did as a government is obviously we had to make some difficult decisions and there were some areas we had to reduce some spending. So for instance, we said to the police, you do a great job but we want you to do it with a lower budget, and they’ve done it and crime has fallen. They’re done a great job. But we looked at apprenticeships and thought actually this is an area where we really should be expanding. [Political content removed]

I think second thing is, this degree apprenticeship – I don’t know what the other parties think, but this is work that we’ve done, listening to businesses, particularly maybe slightly smaller businesses than BAE, maybe some of your suppliers, some of whom have said to us we really want to hire bright graduates, but we sometimes lose out against the big companies because they can do the milk round, they can attract very bright graduates, so we would like to invest in graduates before they even go to university. And so I think this is a very neat scheme which we are particularly pioneering.

So I think it’s good there’s sort of cross-party agreement, apprenticeships are good, but I would argue we’ve thought it through, we’ve put a number on it, and crucially, you know, you can only afford things like apprenticeship programmes if you’ve got a strong economy, and because of the policies we’ve pursued, you know, we’ve created the jobs, we’ve got the economy going, we’re getting the deficit down – a strong economy can support skills and universities and good schools and the rest of it. A weak economy where you don’t get hold of the debts, then you get into trouble.

Question

Hi. I’m curious what you’re doing to try and make housing both more affordable and make sure that it goes to young people.

Prime Minister

Yes. Yes. Very good question. The bold truth is, we just haven’t built enough homes in Britain for many years. Housebuilding has basically declined every decade since the 1960s. So there’s a fundamental problem we’ve got to get to grips with, and that is one of the reasons we have reformed the planning system. We replaced a thousand pages of planning rules with just 50 pages and now we’ve seen, I think, in the last year 240,000 planning permissions go through, so we are building more houses.

But I don’t think that’s enough just to build houses. We need to change the system, and there are two fundamental things we’ve done that I think will make a big difference. One is Help to Buy. This is a scheme that basically recognises many of you in a couple of years’ time with a well-paid job and a partner in a job – you could afford a mortgage payment, and so you could afford to live in a house you own, but you might struggle to get the deposit together because the banks and the building societies recently have only been offering 70%, 80% loan-to-value mortgages.

So Help to Buy says, if you can afford the mortgage payments, we will help you by ensuring that part of the mortgage that takes us up to 90% or 95%. So this has enabled 88,000 people in our country in the last 3 years, young people mostly, to buy their first home because they’ve been able to have a small deposit, maybe £10,000 or £15,000, and then they’ve been able to afford the mortgage payment. So Help to Buy is absolutely crucial and we’ll keep that going in the next parliament.

Second thing we’re going to do is build starter homes for sale rather than for rent. I think most people want to own their own flat or their own home. They don’t want to rent forever, and so we need to build homes that young people can afford. So these homes, they’ll be 80% of the normal market value. We won’t make the builders have to build so many other affordable homes at the same time to keep the price down. They’ll be reserved for people who are under the age of 40 so they can’t be bought by buy-to-let landlords, they can’t be bought by foreign property investors, they are reserved for young people living in Britain who want to get on the housing ladder.

So I think those 3 things: change the planning system to get Britain building, build starter homes, and have Help to Buy so you don’t need a massive great deposit. Those 3 things I think will make a real difference, because I want us to be a country where people who work hard, who do the right thing, can afford to buy their own home, and at the moment not enough people are able to do that, and it needs to change.

Question

Thank you. Some professional staff across several companies feel that apprentices are being brought in to replace their jobs. How do you propose to create the harmony to, you know, encourage new apprentices to come in but also to restore the faith in all these people who are building these things?

Prime Minister

I think – yes. Look, I think that’s a really good point because there is a danger, of course, that companies will hire apprentices in order to have relatively low-cost labour to replace people who are working very hard. And that’s why we have to make sure that the apprenticeship schemes are quality schemes, that there is real training and education involved. And the apprenticeship minister is sitting right in front of me, Matt Hancock, and that is a very important part of his role to make sure that we don’t let companies do that. So they have to be good schemes, good quality, good education.

So, yes, the company’s benefiting, because they’re getting bright people to work for them, but the individuals are benefitting too because they’re getting training and they’re getting skills. And that, I think, is the key because we’ve got to make sure that, as you leave your apprenticeship, you’re going to get a well-paid job. And I was asking here, you know, what the figures are, and actually they compare very well – better – 4 years of an apprenticeship here, at BAE Systems, you’re earning more than a university graduate going into a graduate job typically would get. So, you know, I think it is working, but we’ve got to keep our eye on the quality of the apprenticeships. And also, I think we need to look at the minimum wages that are paid, including the apprenticeship minimum wage, which I want to see rise. I think it’s time for that to rise, and I hope we can make some progress in the coming days.

Question

Hi. I’m just wondering with the US saying that we – they were worried about how much we spend about defence. Do you think that we need to spend more on, you know, BAE or defence as a whole?

Prime Minister

Yes. Look, I think the defence budget is absolutely a crucial part of our national security. There are other parts too. We’ve got to invest in our security services, intelligence services, GCHQ, policing. These things are all about our national security. Our defence budget is the second biggest in NATO. We’re one of the only countries in Europe that spend 2% of our GDP on defence. And what I’ve said very clearly is, look, the most important thing is that we are clear about the equipment budget for the next ten years, because that is really the key to having a – forces and capabilities that, with the Americans and others, we can make a difference in the world.

And so, I’m not saying all of it will go to BAE Systems. But the £160 billion over the next 10 years that’s going to pay for the aircraft carriers, the Type 26s, the submarines, the typhoons, the F-35s – in my constituency, I’ve got the Voyager aircraft, and the A400Ms at RAF Brize Norton. The money for those things is there, so we can have the confidence we’re going to be a front rank defence player with the Americans. We meet 2%. We meet it this year, we’ll meet it next year. The time to set the defence budget overall is at the next spending round, but I will be very cognisant of the fact that, you know, you get what you pay for in defence.

What we’ve done the last 5 years is that we basically kept the defence budget level, at about £35 billion: as I say, fifth biggest in the world, second biggest in NATO. And by keeping it level, we’ve had to take some difficult decisions, but actually we’ve got rid of the great black hole in our defence budget, where we were signed up to lots of things we couldn’t afford. What we’re now signed up to, we can afford.

And crucially, when you talk to our troops, when you talk to our navy, our RAF, and you ask them about their equipment, you know, they say we’ve now got some of the best equipment anywhere in the world. I always ask this question. I’ve been to Afghanistan, I think 13 times in the last 10 years, and the last time I went, you know, not a complaint about helicopters, about equipment, about body armour, about what we’ve got for our forces. So, I’m satisfied we have a strong budget. We’re going to have to set it at the next spending round, but the equipment budget is absolutely secured, and I think that’s the crucial part of the long-term deal for defence.

Question

Good morning, Prime Minister. I am an employer of apprenticeships and degrees as well, and I do consider there’s a – what you’ve announced today, I think it’s absolutely brilliant in terms of the linkages between apprentices and degree courses. But as an employer, we do find there’s a delta between the graduates coming out of university now, in having the appropriate skills that the universities are offering them, to the actual skills that we need as an employer in industry and in engineering. So, I was just wondering if more could be done to align the universities to engage with the companies to create those specific needs and work closer?

Prime Minister

I think that’s a really important point. You know, at the end of the day, the education system’s only working if we’re producing school leavers and graduates that can do the jobs that a modern economy is generating. And I think degree apprenticeships absolutely will help with that, because, in future, if you want, you can talk to a school leaver about doing an apprenticeship with you and a degree at the same time, and so you’ll be working with them through their university career. But that’s only 1 solution. I would say also we need employers to get stuck in with the universities and talk to them about the capabilities and the courses that would be most useful for them. I think that would make a difference.

Third thing is publishing better information. It’s disappointing we still don’t really have – we will have soon, but a proper database where you can search, ‘If I do this degree at this university, or this course at this college, what job and what pay am I likely to get?’ We should have a totally searchable database so that young people can see far more detail about what I will get out of the education I’m undertaking. I think that would make a difference.

Third and final thing. This is very basic, but the basics really matter. Lots of companies I go to, when I ask them how many apprentices they’re creating, they might say 10 or 20. And then I ask how many people apply, and they’ll say 100/200. And I say, ‘Well, how on earth do you decide how to take the 10 or the 20?’ And they say, ‘Well, the problem is, Prime Minister, that all too often lots of the people applying haven’t got the basic maths and English that are at the heart of any apprenticeship.’ And I do think we do need to make sure that everyone in our school is studying English and maths at least to GCSE level, so that they’ve got those basic qualifications. I think, in the past, sometimes people were almost told, you know, well there are vocation skills and there are academic skills. But actually English and maths are key vocational skills as well. So, I think instilling that into our primary and secondary schools is absolutely vital to solving the problem that you are talking about.

Can I thank you again for the very warm welcome? Can I thank you for what you do at this amazing company? Can I wish you well, all of you starting out or some way through your apprenticeships? I hope you find you’ve made really great choice, because in the end this is what this is all about. We can talk about policies and manifestos and facts and figures, but in the end what it’s about is: are we giving people the chance to get on in life and achieve their dreams, to get a decently paid job, to raise a family, to have a home of their own, to enjoy a decent quality of life in this great country? That, to me, is what apprenticeships are about, and that is what great businesses like this are all about. It’s a privilege to work with you here at BAE Systems [Political content removed] ] It’s been an enormous privilege over the last 5 years to get to know just some of what you do at this great business. Thank you very much indeed.

Speech: Managing intellectual property

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 10:55:00 +0000

Introduction

As Minister for Intellectual Property I am pleased to have been invited to give the keynote address at this important International Patent Forum. IP is important for us as a nation. £63.5 billion, over 4% of GDP , is invested in intellectual property rights. This is an investment in knowledge. Making the most of those intellectual assets, both in the UK and across the globe, is more important now than it ever has been.

When I was appointed Minister for Intellectual Property last summer I was struck by the importance of IP to our creative and scientific industries. I was also delighted to see that the UK was judged by Taylor Wessing to have the best IP regime in the world.

This was confirmed recently in the US Global IP Centre International Index which ranked the UK number one for enforcement, and recognised all we have done in the past year.

Some highlights are:

Bringing together copyright owners and search engines to reduce the number of infringing websites which appear in search engine results.

Securing additional funding for PIPCU , the IP crime unit in the City of London Police. This unit is the first of its kind in the world and is dedicated to tackling the sale of counterfeit goods and the availability of infringing websites online.

Engaging in Europe on collective rights management, trade mark reform, and trade secrets. We have also been building international relationships, for example with China, India, Brazil, Mexico and south east Asia where we have worked closely with local partners to help improve cooperation, identify business issues and increase enforcement capacity.

The IPO is also at the forefront of the government’s ‘digital transformation’ programme. Over 90% of patents are now renewed online; the online filing system for designs is due to launch next year; and work is underway to offer further digital services. And although less important for patents than other areas of IP we are very engaged in bringing our expertise to commission thinking on the digital single market.

Because IP can be a driver for growth and investment, I am therefore pleased to announce today that the IPO , working with industry and the financial services sector, has developed an IP Finance Toolkit. This will help businesses to present the security and financial worth of their IP when seeking finance and help banks recognise the value of IP in a business. It will assist businesses which are rich in intangibles, but lack traditional assets, to make a stronger case when they need to access the finance they need to grow.

Attachés

It is important that we help British business make the most of their IP by investing abroad. I know from my own business experience that investing and operating in foreign markets can be challenging for companies. They can be fearful of IP infringement and poor enforcement regimes overseas. I feel we can and should help with that. This means helping create a better system in the future to protect investments. And it means standing side-by-side with our companies as they navigate the global IP systems they find today.

The IPO works closely with UK Trade and Investment, and the Foreign Office, to help businesses understand the IP aspects of operating abroad. In addition, our specialist IP attachés support UK businesses in 4 important and challenging markets (China, Brazil, India and South East Asia). We have recently appointed Vijay Iyer to provide support to UK business in India, whilst our attaché Anshika is on maternity leave. We have also added Monica Su to the team in China to assist Tom Duke.

China

I witnessed first hand the vital part our attachés play in achieving successes in foreign markets during my week-long visit to China last year. I led a delegation from the UK including Justice Birss, a UK High Court Judge, senior IPO officials and over 80 British businesses to Beijing in September for the 2nd UK -China IP Symposium.

During the visit, the delegation visited 8 cities and brought together UK and Chinese counterparts at senior ministerial level, as well as at a technical level, to share best practice from our respective IP systems. There was engagement with top ministers and state secretaries.

I facilitated a landmark agreement between the China Britain Business Council (CBBC) and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba which will help address the tens of millions pounds lost to Chinese counterfeiting and piracy via the online platform each year. The agreement is enabling British businesses to gain easier access to Alibaba’s online enforcement mechanisms. This was one of only 2 IP agreements that Alibaba signed in 2014.

This was followed by a constructive exchange in November, when the IPO held discussions with Chinese officials on improving efficiency of patent examination and on civil procedures in IP enforcement. This builds on the UK -China pilot Patent Prosecution Highway, signed during the Prime Minister’s visit in December 2013. The UK is now one of China’s primary partners for IP cooperation, and our engagement is bringing significant benefits for UK businesses.

The Duke of Cambridge’s recent visit demonstrates the importance of the UK ’s relationship with China. Across Shanghai Prince William promoted the best of British creativity: film, design, architecture, digital healthcare, education and fashion. Our IP cooperation with China underpins business opportunities in all these sectors, and is building a platform for global business success in the years to come.

Global patent reform

The UK is also at the forefront of efforts to improve the global patent system to make it work better for business. Most of you will know John Alty, Chief Executive of the IPO , who is leading the B+ group. This is considering how to harmonise patent laws as part of an overall package.

Of course, harmonisation of laws between countries is a gradual process and hence improving the international Patent Cooperation Treaty system is a high priority for us. We recognise that small changes there can have a big impact because of the number of users and offices involved.

We continue to seek other ways to make the patent system more efficient for business. For example we are part of the 19 IP offices which form the Global Patent Prosecution Highway, as well as having a number of bilateral agreements in place. This allows companies to take advantage of the timely service on offer in the UK to speed up approval of their patents abroad.

The message from users is clear: harmonisation of patent issues such as the grace period is important - even if there is not yet consensus on the end result. And users have been equally clear that, to be worthwhile, harmonisation must be truly international. Group B+ provides an opportunity to harmonise across a wide range of key markets, something which cannot be achieved through bilateral trade agreements.

UPC /unitary patent

At the European level we are making progress on the Unified Patent Court and Unitary Patent.

I know one of your biggest concerns is how much this new system will cost. One of the principles we are seeking to get accepted is that any charges will reflect cost and, of course, that the system is sustainable. Renewal fees for the unitary patent will be set by the participating states in the EPO Select Committee. They have an ambitious timetable to reach agreement on renewal fees and other financial issues by the summer.

As far as the Court is concerned, the Preparatory Committee is expected to run a 3 month consultation on a draft set of Court fees this spring. This will be your opportunity to have your say, which I encourage you to do.

London will have responsibility for life sciences cases in the Unified Patent Court. This is a great opportunity for the UK life sciences sector, which is one of the most productive in the world, generating turnover of over £50 billion and contributing more than £12 billion a year to the UK economy.

Conclusion

All this shows the government is committed to helping protect the intellectual assets of British business in key markets abroad, through engagement with key decision makers and by negotiating for the best outcomes for UK business.

We also need to ensure that the IP framework in the UK continues to meet the needs of its users. I would like to finish by outlining my vision for IP with 3 themes.

Firstly, we must ensure that the IP framework encourages innovation by offering the correct incentives to foster creative thinking. To do this we need to have the correct legal framework and networks of good practice.

Secondly, there must be adequate enforcement mechanisms. In the UK we are strong in this area, for example PIPCU , and also more recently the reforms made to the Intellectual Property and Enterprise Court which are widely admired.

Thirdly, we need to reach out to the future creators by making sure they learn about the importance of intellectual property. The IPO has developed education strategy to make sure that IP awareness is increased amongst school children and also amongst those at university studying relevant.

By doing these things, we will ensure that the UK continues to have a world class IP system good for all of you involved with the Forum and good for our economic well-being as a nation.

Thank you for listening.

Speech: StudentshIP Enterprise Awards 2015

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 14:00:05 +0000

Hello. I am delighted to be here to launch our new online training package - Intellectual Property ( IP ) Tutor - and present the prizes for our StudentshIP Enterprise Awards. There are 3 important themes today:

helping people understand the value and importance of IP
giving people the skills they need to compete in a demanding employment market
ensuring growth that will create job opportunities for the future

Ministers are sometimes accused of only talking about success and of ignoring anything which does not fit into this happy pattern. I want to do the opposite and mention some of the reasons why it is essential we make progress on these 3 issues.

I take as my text a European Commission report of September 2014 on member states’ competitiveness. Say what you like about the Commission, they are good at putting together dispassionate, reasonably objective, accounts of how matters stand.

Some of their report makes uncomfortable reading. Our manufacturing constitutes a significantly lower percentage of Gross Domestic Product ( GDP ) than it does in most member states; and manufacturing productivity is increasing more slowly than most. Our young adult population scores significantly below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD ) average on basic skills and qualifications. And whilst larger companies tend to provide training or education, most companies are small and just 15% of employers offer apprenticeships, many of which are low level. Plenty to work on there. And we are making good progress especially on apprenticeships and on improving the results in our schools.

Of course there are some good points in the report. For example on innovation we are recognised as above average.

That makes it all the more important that we press ahead energetically with advances like those we are discussing today. The only way to get better is to actively seek to improve.

I turn now to IP , our main subject.

The UK has a proud history of innovation and creativity and we also enjoy a rich cultural heritage in which the creative industries make a vital contribution.

As Minister for Intellectual Property I am clear that future generations should understand the ins and outs of intellectual property. This is important for everything from defending our biggest or newest brands to the copyright in pop music and the patents for life saving drugs.

I believe that every child should leave school with a basic understanding of IP principles and a respect for others’ IP . All graduates should know enough about IP to manage ideas effectively within their chosen field.

To achieve that goal we need to make IP an integrated part of learning from the earliest school years through primary, secondary and higher education. In a recent report, Mike Weatherley MP said the government needed to support education professionals, with online resources and lesson plans, so IP finds its way into the curriculum via other subjects.

From the earliest age, our children will be given opportunities to connect with the basic principles of intellectual property.

We have worked with Aardman Animations – a great example of a highly successful British company. We have developed a competition, aligned with the new film Shaun in the City, that allows children to explore the different types of intellectual property. Alongside this there are lesson plans and activities for teachers to introduce the concepts of innovation, creativity and IP in the classroom. These aren’t for standalone ‘ IP lessons’, they link to core curriculum subjects. By doing all this children will understand how IP links to the real world – from fiction and works of art to the world of fashion where designs and brands are a huge part of value created, to wearable electronics now used in sport or long term medical care.

Over the coming year, we will be extending this further by developing materials aimed at secondary school pupils. These will link into topics such as business studies, information technology and music. We will be building an online portal, drawing together resources, games and videos to support IP education for all students throughout their school and university life.

As children grow up it won’t just be school lessons that are important. It will also be the culture they experience in their peer group. We need them really to understand why IP is so important. Many young people aspire to careers in IP rich industries – even if they are not aware of it. The UK has an outstanding record in creative industries – music, computer games and television. We have a proud record in invention and design too – Dyson being just one house hold name that excels in this area. These businesses rely on intellectual property. By protecting their IP they are able to generate income for their business, build a competitive advantage and invest in future innovation.

We are working with partners to demonstrate the value of IP to businesses. The BBC’s ‘Dragons’ Den’ has inspired many would-be entrepreneurs to protect their IP from the outset. Working with UK Music we developed Music Inc, an app based game that allows people to experience the highs and lows of taking a new artist and nurturing them to become a star. In the year since we launched the game we have had over 190,000 players and we can see that, as they see the impact of piracy, their behaviours within the game begin to change – so we know this approach really can work.

You are here today representing the brightest and best of the UK’s talent - our university students. We know that they are looking to maximise their employment prospects and that the job market for student leavers has changed. Today’s graduates know that they can no longer rely on their core qualifications alone to secure graduate level employment.

For these reasons, giving them a sound understanding of business and professional conduct, along with nurturing entrepreneurial attributes is important. IP is a key element of this innovative enterprise and is now vital for University leavers.

A survey of students told us that 80% felt that IP was important for their future careers, yet only 40% think their knowledge is sufficient – clearly there is room for improvement here.

Over the coming years, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education ( QAA ) - will be reviewing the benchmarks for university courses. These set out the essential elements a degree course must cover. The IPO is working closely with the QAA to include IP in the relevant subject benchmarks.

Engineering is especially important. I know as my step daughter works on the international construction of a nuclear fusion reactor at ITER in the South of France, the biggest construction project in Europe on some metrics. An amendment has already been made to the benchmark for engineering degrees and all engineering courses offered from September 2016 will include a component of IP learning.

Today we are here to launch IP Tutor, an excellent online learning tool. You will have an opportunity to try it for yourselves later today. It covers all the basic forms of IP – patents, designs, copyright, trade marks and trade secrets. It has a number of different paths tailored to meet the needs of different disciplines. So, whether you are a student in a STEM subject or one of the humanities, specialising in business or law, or a creative arts student – there is an IP Tutor option for you.

Learning is a vital first step but we also need to help students put what they learn into practice. I will shortly be awarding prizes to the winners of the StudentshIP Enterprise Awards.

These awards promote and celebrate the practical application of IP skills. We had an excellent field to choose from. Competition was fierce, with some really strong entries and great ideas. And no one knows who is going to win!

We know that, right now, the IP education we are giving young people is not good enough. But this will improve. It must improve. Ours is an increasingly knowledge based economy – we invest more in intangible assets than in buildings or machinery. Future generations need to understand IP . It is through the development of new ideas, design and creativity that we will secure long term growth. And through this long term growth we will create job opportunities. Through integration of IP into the school room and university life we can achieve this. I hope you will join me in spreading the word – IP is essential for our future.

Consultation outcome: Alternative providers of higher education: improving quality and value for money

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 09:00:00 +0000

Updated: Added summary of feedback and outcome.

We want to know your views on proposals aimed at improving the quality and value for money of higher education that is provided by ‘alternative providers’. These are organisations that provide higher education courses for students but don’t receive funding from, and are not regulated by, the Higher Education Funding Council for England ( HEFCE ).

Our 3 proposals aim to support students to make well informed choices and encourage providers to put student success first. These are to:

improve English language requirements at alternative providers
improve information for prospective students
relate the number of students providers can recruit against their performance

We believe the proposals will improve the likelihood that students at alternative providers will:

succeed in their courses
complete their qualifications
go on to gain from their higher education experience

We recognise the proposals may have particular impacts on some providers. We welcome views on any practical implications for providers in meeting these requirements.

Speech: Future of manufacturing

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 11:03:00 +0000

It’s a pleasure to be here at the EEF today, and to be addressing you, the people who’ve designed, built, and welded together the British recovery. I want to begin by thanking EEF for inviting me to speak.

You are tireless advocates for UK manufacturing. Even though no-one knows what your initials stand for, we all know what you stand for: supporting the manufacturing businesses that are crucial for the future of our economy.

The people in this room, you enrich our society by exporting, by investing, by creating jobs.

Your success is mission critical to our vision…

Of a country that pays its way…

that is more balanced, by sector, by geography…
here we strive to be the best place in the world to start and grow a business…
in so doing become the most prosperous major nation upon this earth…

I am proud to be part of a government with this long-term economic plan at its heart, which strains day and night to champion your interests. We will back you, not just with rhetoric - though we will unashamedly do that. We will back you with action.

You told us you needed a more balanced economy, with more growth outside the South East.

We’ve listened and we’re creating the Northern Powerhouse, with jobs growing faster in the North East and North West than in London.

You told us you needed action on energy costs.

We’ve listened and introduced a £7 billion package of support, including compensation for energy-intensive industries to stop industry simply moving overseas.

You told us you needed more high quality, employer-led apprenticeships.

We’ve asked leading companies in aerospace, automotive, life sciences and food, to rewrite the apprentice rulebook. Already young people are starting on these new trailblazer Apprenticeships, rigorous and responsive to employers’ needs.

You told us you needed a modern industrial strategy: custom-made policy support for all industries which require government to take a long-term view.

From the new sector councils, to our Catapult innovation centres, to funding partnerships for the latest technology – in partnership, we are delivering.

And today we publish our Manufacturing Supply Chain Action Plan which sets out our next steps to strengthen supply chains further.

We believe in manufacturing, not because we see you as producers rather than predators, not because you’re a handy source of tax, but because we believe in British business.

I don’t care whether you’re a FTSE giant, a mid-cap mittelstand, or a micro-business you run off your kitchen table, whether you’re based in London or Londonderry, whether you work at a desk, a factory, or drive a white van. What matters to me - what matters to us - is that you provide things other people want to buy. You solve other peoples’ problems.

And my first question is ‘what can we do to make it easier to help you to do business?’

In some areas this means government doing less. Less taxing, less regulating, less spending the country can’t afford.

In this parliament we’ve delivered the most competitive corporation tax in the G20, doubled the annual investment allowance, and taken 400,000 small businesses out of employer NICs altogether with our Employment Allowance.

We’ve taken £10 billion off the cost of domestic red tape and are on track to be the first Government in modern times to reduce the burden of regulation.

I want to thank the EEF in particular for your strong support for our Focus on Enforcement programme in which you tell us how we can improve the way regulations are inforced.

Our action on red tape has included cutting employment tribunals by 80 percent, freeing thousands of firms from unnecessary inspections. It’s part of a wider drive to remove unnecessary burdens.

We’ve even removed the age restrictions on the sale chocolate liqueurs.

Because we all know the sad sight of a group of teenagers, sat on a park bench, off their heads on a box of Thorntons.

Tackling regulatory burdens will also form part of our plans to reform Europe, and address uncertainty over Britain’s unhappy relationship with Europe in the next parliament, once and for all.

And we’ve kept interest rates low and our economy safe by not deviating from our deficit reduction plan. I want to thank you, very personally, for the support you gave us when siren voices insisted we abandon course. You stuck with us and we saw it turn out right.

And you know it’s not enough just to stop at that. It’s not just about government doing less.

There are some things government needs to do more of: on skills, finance, infrastructure and science.

So we are unabashedly interventionist.

Take science. Working alongside business and using the best independent research, we have identified eight great technologies where the UK has the capability to become a world leader: from robotics, to regenerative medicine.

We are backing them and we are doing so alongside private sector investment.

For years Britain had a reputation as a place where ideas were born, but where commercial deployment happened elsewhere. We are ending that, supporting great ideas all the way from the lab to the marketplace.

On finance, we’ve introduced tough new regulations for the City, to clear up the mess from the crash.

And we’ve established the British Business Bank, the first of its kind in the UK, with a mandate to unlock new forms of business finance, including new challenger banks.

The Business Bank also manages our successful Start-Up Loan programme, which has helped start 25,000 small businesses so far.

On skills we have put in place radical long-term reforms.

When we came into government, so-called ‘programme-led’ apprenticeships meant that some apprentices were not required to spend any time in the workplace at all.

We’ve changed the rules so that every apprenticeship must be a paid job, in a real workplace, lasting at least 12 months, and with high quality off-the-job training.

Some predicted that tackling quality in this way would lead to a fall in the quantity of apprentices.

In fact, the number of people doing an apprenticeship has doubled since the election. We have already seen the two millionth Apprentice in this parliament.

I’m proud of this rejuvenation of an ancient concept - in the next parliament we have committed to three million high quality, employer-led Apprentices.

This pro-youth, pro-opportunity agenda is working. Youth unemployment is falling at record rates. Apprenticeships are a partnership between government and business for the betterment of both the economy and society. In that sense they are a metaphor for our wider approach.

Because you are the ultimate source of society’s prosperity, any sensible Government has an obligation to support you to succeed. After all, business, done right is a force for good in society. But businesses in turn have obligations to the free enterprise society of which they are a part.

Markets are free and competitive only in a strong framework - of law and reasonable behaviour. It’s a reciprocal arrangement, something for something.

Here’s the way I see this deal:

we’ll keep taxes low, but we expect them to be paid in full
we’ll keep Whitehall off your back, but we expect you to pay your suppliers on time
when the economy’s in a slump we’ll understand if you can’t manage a pay-rise, but when it’s growing that’s exactly what we want to see

I have huge faith in that partnership because of what it has achieved so far:

three quarters of a million new businesses, since 2010
1.8 million more people in work
2 million apprenticeships
the fastest growth in the G7
world number one for research citations
record numbers going to university
record numbers from the poorest backgrounds going to university
record numbers of women, young people, older people and people from ethnic minorities all starting their own business
business investment up
exports to China up
wages rising
energy bills falling
the deficit halved

Yes there is more to do. But. That is what is at risk if we were to abandon our long-term economic plan. And I want to talk very frankly for a second about that risk.I thought about whether to do so in this speech. It would be better if I didn’t have to. But I come from a small business background. I know from personal experience what it’s like when the economy goes wrong and it affects your business and your family.

And now, I’m privileged to be in a position to try to stop it happening to others.

We will to stand up for small business on late payment. We’ve already legislated to require large companies to publish their payment terms. This transparency will allow us to highlight the best, and also admonish the worst sort of behaviour. It will help us make prompt payment a boardroom subject, as it needs to be.

We must change UK payment culture. Unacceptable payment terms must stop. Why should long payment terms be deemed acceptable business practice here when they are not in many of our major competitors, like Germany?

From this week, all public sector contracts must by law pay on 30 days, and the 30 day terms must be cascaded down the supply chain.

Today I can announce we will go further.

I don’t want to legislate to interfere with a contract law that is used throughout the world. But I am not prepared to take further legislation off the table if payment culture doesn’t improve.

We are rewriting the Prompt Payment Code.

Now it will say that 30 day payment terms are to be the norm of acceptable behaviour in the UK, with 60 days as the maximum in all but exceptional circumstances. This revised Code will have teeth, with a new enforcement body which will be able to eject companies that fail to live up to the new standards, and potentially with the power to levy fines.

I have written to major firms to explain that new transparency measures will make a company’s payment terms a reputational issue. Now I expect all major UK companies to sign up to the tougher new Prompt Payment Code and tackle this problem once and for all.

For ultimately, a contract law people can trust, where agreements signed up to are reasonable, and are then followed, is good for businesses large and small.

We expect the very best of British business because of working with you and believing in you, that is what I see.

Over these past five years we’ve come a long way. Our country is heading in the right direction, thanks to that partnership with you.

Together we will lay the roads and rail our country needs to grow, we will equip our young people with the skills they need to succeed, and we will rebalance the economy so that it is divided not by wealth but by economic specialism.

And while the right policies are important, just as important is a government which understands that business is the ultimate source of our wealth, security and freedom as a nation. That without the entrepreneurial drive to solve other peoples’ problems, and be rewarded for doing so, without the constant transfer of ideas from drawing board, to assembly line, to catalogue and shop window, nothing else is possible.

We understand, and we know that with right support from us, you can make Britain the most prosperous major economy in the world. And in reaching that goal we will always be by your side.

Speech: Vision for a digital single market

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 13:00:00 +0000

Thank you for inviting me here today. I come from a country where freedom of speech is valued to another where the same is true. Sometimes there is a price to pay for freedom. In Copenhagen you have just paid a large price. Our thoughts and support are with you.

Today, I am here to reflect on how to unleash the potential in the European digital economy. The digital revolution offers massive opportunities for both businesses and consumers, but also generates concern about how best to handle the many issues related to the digital economy.

I will come back to some of the concrete measures that need to be taken in a moment. But, first I want to touch very briefly on some of the wider implications of that revolution.

As a consequence of the digital revolution many tasks are being either mechanised or are becoming subject to global competition.

Carl Benedikt Frey of Oxford University found that digital businesses require very little capital to get started.

In a recent survey of 96 mobile app developers the average cost of developing an app was €5700. WhatsApp, the instant messaging software firm started with $250,000. And was sold to Facebook for $19 billion. However, WhatsApp only employed 55 people at that point. That is thought provoking.

The digital revolution is transforming Europe’s economy and is changing the labour markets. Certain occupations will change or disappear due to automation whereas new jobs requiring digital skills will emerge.

We see all around us that those who are skilled and educated are doing better and better. Others are less fortunate.

As with other new technologies from the spinning machine to the railways, our societies will have to find a way forward which mitigates these effects. If we don’t we will be storing trouble for ourselves.

Digital is disruptive. It stimulates innovation, it allows for new business models, but can also upset the accepted practice of established businesses.

But the response cannot be to shut down the digital world or create reams of new regulations that stifle innovation before it has even had a chance to leave the page.

Nor can we simply allow the internet to be a virtual ‘wild west’, where consumers are unsure of their rights and feel unprotected.

Instead, we need to create a robust and thriving digital single market, within which unnecessary barriers are removed, and consumers and business are given the confidence to operate online across the whole of the EU.

I thought it right just to offer these comments on these aspects of the digital revolution. And now I turn now to talk about the concrete measures to take.

Today I want to focus my comments on 2 aspects of the digital economy that have particular economic potential:

e-commerce
the provision of digital services online

E-commerce

Like many of you, I have personal experience (during 17 years at EuroCommerce and elsewhere in retail) of the challenges the retail businesses face as consumers turn to online shopping, on PCs, on tablets and increasingly on smartphones, with e-commerce turnover growing across Europe at about 16% last year according to E-commerce Europe.

There are no easy fixes for the transition from physical shops to the multichannel world, but it is important to keep the potential in mind.

While 47% of EU consumers have purchased online from a seller based in their home country, only 15% have purchased online from another EU country.

Empowering consumers to shop online in other EU countries will help open up the European market and not limit, for example, Danish businesses to the 5 million consumers living in Denmark.

This is not only an opportunity for businesses. EU consumers could benefit greatly. One estimate by Civic Consulting suggests that consumers could benefit by over €10 billion per year from the lower prices and greater choice currently offered online.

How can we achieve these benefits? We believe that in order to empower consumers, we should consider the following:

introducing a common set of consumer rights tailored to the purchase of digital content
ensuring that EU consumer protection rules are easy for consumers to understand and act on, and properly enforced by all member states working together
ensuring that prices for digital products and services should not change unfairly on the basis of where consumers come from in the EU

This doesn’t mean that we should have one uniform pricing system across the EU – there are lots of good reasons why prices will vary across the EU – and companies should always be free to tailor their products to particular markets.

However, it doesn’t seem right in a single market that a consumer trying to rent a car should find that the price they are offered increases when they fill in the online form to say where they live.

We have some experience to bring to the party. In October our new Consumer Rights Bill is expected to come into force in the UK. This will set out clearly for the first time the rights and remedies that consumers have when they purchase digital content.

They can get some redress if the digital content doesn’t work as expected - firstly a repair or replacement, such as a new download, and in some cases some money back. But consumers won’t have the right to return faulty digital content, such as a download. This is because it is difficult to be sure that the software has not been retained by the consumer.

We think that this is a model that could possibly be applied at the EU level. After all, digital content doesn’t respect national borders.

So that is the consumer end, but to allow business to take advantage of the single market, sell online and grow we need to do 3 things:

First of all, we need to make it easier to establish a business in other member states.

This should be done by creating simpler company registration and making it possible to comply with all company law requirements in any MS online.

This also means continuing to look at the use of technology, such as the VAT One Stop Shop concept, to make it easier for businesses to register and declare VAT on cross-border transactions.

We should also make it easier to register a website by for example dispensing with the requirement for a physical address in the country providing the domain name.

Secondly, we need to make it possible to navigate national identity requirements through a secure, business-friendly, cross-border electronic identity process.

Finally, we need to give easy access to information on how to trade online in any member state. The public sector, that means the Commission, member states and local government, can lead the way here.

These are just some of our ideas on how to improve e-commerce across Europe – we have produced a discussion paper on e-Commerce that covers these suggestions in more detail.

Copyright

Selling physical goods is one thing. Digital services offer their own separate challenges.

Consumers and businesses increasingly and understandably expect to be able to access a range of creative content wherever they are in the EU. They also expect that travelling across borders should not place barriers to the use of that content.

I long for a day when I can access my Sky subscription and TV and BBC drama when I travel (to Aix en Provence). Europe’s creative output is one of its richest resources and those who want to enjoy it should be able to pay to do so, even if it isn’t available in their own member state.

We want to see a digital single market where there is greater availability of legitimate content on fair and reasonable terms. This should reduce incentives for copyright piracy and ensure that creators get the rewards they deserve.

At the same time, Europe needs to protect intellectual property and the incentives to invest in creating that intellectual property to ensure a flourishing and innovative creative sector. This will be a difficult balance to strike and it is important that we get it right.

In Europe, according to a joint study by the European Patent Office (EPO) and The Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), 4.2% of the total EU GDP in 2010 was generated by Copyright-intensive industries. The equivalent figure for the UK is 4.7% and in Denmark 4.1%.

Our enforcement of intellectual property in copyright, the largest area, design, trademarks and patents, must also have teeth. The online world has created billions of pounds of opportunities for IP theft and the important work done by member states, Europol and Interpol must be factored in to our plans for the digital single market.

If we want companies to make their content more widely available they need to be confident that the enforcement framework should back them up.

So we want to see clearer rules across Europe, and targeted changes based on the best available evidence to ensure we have a copyright framework that supports economic growth, protects our creators, rewards creativity and responds to consumer needs.

Conclusions

This event is very important, because it is at the right time and in the right place. Several member states with key interests in the digital single market are here today. Present are also the businesses that will live and hopefully thrive in the growing digital world, and the representative bodies that support them. I look much forward to hearing your thoughts today.

Robert Madelin from DG Connect will also be speaking today. He will play a key role as we approach May when the Commission will put forward their strategy for the digital single market.

The UK is very keen to see an ambitious digital package which in brief helps Europe to catch up with Silicon Valley. Of course any proposal must as always be properly assessed against evidence, and costed.

I have outlined some of the problems as I see them, and some of the priorities the UK has for the digital single market. But it is immensely important that you as representatives of the European business sector make your voices heard and engage in the practicalities.

I believe that digital, harnessed correctly, can be a source for growth and productivity and of significant consumer benefits. There will, I believe, be many opportunities for small businesses as well as large ones in this process.

The market has changed, is changing and will change more - whether we like it or not. All my 4 children live online, frankly sometimes showing a lack of common courtesy. My little granddaughters scratch at magazines as though they were operating an IPad, digital natives to the core.

We need to make sure that we make that right decisions for these younger generations when regulating these very complex areas. We need to work together constructively and with a good knowledge base. That is how we can ensure that Europe reaps the full potential of the digital revolution.

Speech: Higher education: funding and co-operation

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 11:52:49 +0000

This is a formidable gathering, in a formidable setting.

The great William Beveridge, Vice Chancellor of the University of London, described this Bloomsbury campus as:

“Something that could not have been built by any earlier generation than this… an academic island in swirling tides of traffic; a world of learning in a world of affairs.”

A world of learning, but still, to be sure, distinct from the world of affairs swirling around it.

Any earlier generation than this, our own generation, could scarcely have dreamed of the centrality of the world of learning not only to the world of affairs today, but to the way that we live now.

In the mid-1920s when Beveridge was Vice Chancellor there were 60,000 students in British universities. Just 2.7% of the population entered higher education.

When Lionel Robbins wrote his report there were 216,000 students, and 8.5% of the population entered university.

This year half a million undergraduates entered university. And the UCAS end of cycle report tells us that, in England more than 40% of people who were 18 in 2013 were accepted to enter higher education by last October.

And from being places apart from the world of affairs, universities are now at the heart of our society and our economy:

directly and indirectly employing almost half a million people
generating half a million graduates and postgraduates a year without which – in quality and quantity – our economy would not be flying high in the global champions’ league, as it is, but rootling among the relegated
earning more than £9 billion in foreign exchange and benefiting from the talents of international students
running off a spring of discoveries that transform – not just the lives of Britons, but those of mankind
and most important of all, forming – directly and through onward transmission – a culture of inquiry, discovery, independence, empiricism and creativity that is enormous a part of what makes what we are as a nation

Universities are often the leading institution in our cities, towns and counties – and, increasingly, their leaders take their place in actual economic leadership of places.

None of this is a matter of sentiment. Your indispensability to the future is obvious.

Any nation – just as any person – needs to ask itself from time to time: “how am I going to make a living in the future?”

It seems to me to be a good way of answering this to first consider what you’re good at, and then consider whatever those talents and strengths are going to be in demand in the years ahead.

When it comes to universities, science and research we are exceptionally good at them – in fact, we are excellent. And as the world grows more educated, more technically accomplished, more wealthy, more free, more connected, these strengths are in dependably growing demand.

So the central feature of government policy towards universities is that you are not viewed from afar, as another world, Beveridge’s world of learning adjacent to the world of affairs; or as an interest group to be managed, or a line in a budget to be covered off – you are central to the long term future of Britain. Britain will not succeed to its full potential unless you flourish to your full potential.

What do you need to flourish in the future?

First, there has to be confidence and stability.

Whether it is in establishing and running programmes of research or in recruiting people into academic courses, or planning buildings for students. The decisions you take extend are beyond the life of governments.

You can’t invest in scientific infrastructure and commit to partnerships, or renew your facilities, without confidence in the stability of arrangements.

Last week I wrote the government’s annual funding letter to Tim and Madeleine. It confirmed that funding for teaching, for the next academic year would be exactly as planned a year ago.

Stability.

And the potential for growth for those institutions attracting new students.

In the face of the deficit, where big reductions in spending have had to be made, the reforms to the system of student funding has meant that teaching resource available for universities has increased from around £7.9 billion in 2011 to 2012 to £8.5 billion in 2013 to 2014 and £9.8 billion in 2015 to 2016.

The system is working, far from being put off, students have been attracted in ever growing numbers, especially from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. A 10% rise in a single year in the number of entrants from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Mary Curnock-Cook, the head of UCAS , called it “a stunning account of social progress” and she was right.

The reform of student finance has allowed the historic decision to be made to abolish the cap on student numbers, which amounted a policy to keep capable people out of university. We can’t afford to do that, as a society or as an economy.

As the OECD concluded, having examined higher education systems across the world:

“The UK is one of the few countries to have figured out a sustainable approach to higher education finance… and the investments pay off for individuals and taxpayer.” “England has got it right on paying for higher education.”

I don’t want to see university funding as an issue of division. This is a time for cool heads rather than rushed judgements.

I think it would be a profound misjudgement to throw away a system that is delivering – and which we can now confidently extend to postgraduates – and bring on the chaos of a permanent and fundamental uncertainty in higher education finance that would result from the need to go cap-in-hand to the Treasury every year just to maintain each year’s funding. And to find that whatever was eked out, year by year, came attached to a tangle of strings.

It would be wrong to have to ration student places once again.

And it would also be to the loss of universities and the country to cause the most talented brains to steer clear of university for fear that they would be saddled with a decades-long education tax that bore no relation to the cost of teaching. Not so much a graduate tax as graduate penalty – a klaxon warning that if you’re talented and expect to earn well, not to risk getting a higher education.

Sure, we will have plenty to talk about – ensuring higher cost subjects are well funded, recognising the circumstances of small and specialist institutions, making sure you can maintain your assets as well as invest in new ones.

But that is far better conducted against a background of a stable system rather than one which is thrown up in the air every few years.

Research benefits from stability too. By any measure, UK research is going from strength to strength. As the smoke clears from the REF , a landscape of extraordinary achievement is revealed. Across the 52,000 researchers entered for the REF , 72% of the work was judged world class – up from 51% 6 years ago.

That is consistent with what we know from evidence from citations data – with 1% of the world’s population we have 12% of all citations and 16% of the most highly cited articles in the world.

These achievements are founded in the strength of our arrangements. The dual funding system – supporting research projects and institutions – works and is here to stay.

Excellence, determined by peer-review, the touchstone of that system, and funded wherever it is found – I’m told the first time a piece of text – has ever been underlined in a HEFCE grant letter.

Science resource funding was exempted from the reductions that were made across government programmes and actually increased marginally in cash terms from £4.6 billion in 2010 to 2011 to £4.7 billion in 2015 to 2016.

Science capital investment increased from £0.6 billion in 2012 to 2013 to £1.1 billion next year, and will rise as a minimum in line with inflation for the whole of the next Parliament.

In the ‘Science and innovation strategy’ I make the largest investment in science capital - £5.9 billion over 5 years - which any UK Science Minister has ever made

These choices were made deliberately, consistently, and recently. They reflect the government’s view of science and research as investments in our prosperity.

Economists have a concept of ‘revealed preference’ – people reveal their beliefs through their actions.

That will not change, and our 10 year ‘Science and innovation strategy’ projects with confidence that demeanour over the next 2 Parliaments, not just the next year.

I’ve talked a lot about stability and confidence, but does that mean nothing will ever change?

Of course not. A central insight of our ‘Science and innovation strategy’ is that to maintain and expand our strengths we need – all of us – to think deeply and strategically about how we can respond to the challenges, and reap the opportunities of a future that is anything but unchanging.

Let me mention some of them that we will need to work on together.

First, quality. Our international renown, whether in teaching or research is based on excellence. Every institution benefits from that collective reputation, and it is in all our interests to defend and extend it. There is no future in mediocrity.

In recent years we have allowed different providers of higher education to play a bigger role. Some have added to our excellent reputation – the University of Law, for example enjoys a student satisfaction score of 92%, the envy of many other institutions.

Of course, only around 5% of those claiming student support at the moment are studying at alternative providers, many of whom do a good job. But I want to be very clear that I will not allow any institution – not a single one – to diminish the reputation of higher education in this country that has been so hard won. I announced last week a set of measures to make sure that only quality alternative providers can be designated, that they recruit only students who are suited to their courses, and that student numbers will be tied directly to the quality of their provision.

This insistence on quality has implications for some HEFCE -funded institutions too. Those who validate the degrees of other providers bear a responsibility to satisfy yourselves that you are confident that your standards are upheld – because students will reasonably draw inferences from your association.

In my letter to Tim Melville-Ross, I say that excellent and innovative teaching must be at the heart of a world-beating higher education system and of the student experience.

Tim himself once explained that he had spent 10 years learning, 10 years doing and 10 years teaching. His appreciation of the role of teaching as a career high point is exactly right.

In the REF we have a lens through which to view research quality. I think we have more focussing to do to make differences in teaching quality more discernible to actual and prospective students, which can support a competition on quality such as we see in research.

So I welcome the work HEFCE is doing to refine and test new indicators of teaching quality and learning gain, and, indeed, innovation in teaching. And soon I will be hosting a roundtable with the OECD ’s Director of Education to discuss how nations can get a better handle on comparative learning gain shortly.

As I said earlier, one of the areas in which we are making huge progress is in widening participation. By anyone’s reckoning, a 30% growth in 5 years in young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds going to university, is remarkable progress.

But we have further to go. There are still parts of the country in which half of 18 year olds go to university and others in which only a tenth do. There are talented students in those places all of us have a duty to help identify encourage, educate and bring to flowering.

We know from Les Ebdon’s excellent work that access agreements are playing an important role in increasing focus, investment, ambition and transparency in widening participation across the student lifecycle, and we know from OFFA , from the Sutton Trust, and from brilliant bodies like Teach First that what makes the biggest difference tends not to be the easy choice of investing heavily in fee waivers and bursaries – the income contingent loan system has removed the most significant financial barriers – but the hard miles of detailed, personal engagement with schools and young people, the earlier the better.

As overall participation rises it allows us all to have a much greater focus on what is causing particular places, perhaps particular schools, to lag behind.

As some of our most creative and committed people and institutions in the country I want you not only to build on the tried and tested approaches but also to be entrepreneurial and iconoclastic in trying different things to get more of those people on the ladder.

Just as every talented potential student who thinks that university is not for the likes of them is a depletion of our academic force, so it is that the gap at the top of our universities and institutions underplays our strength. It is taking too long to reflect the reality of admissions – where at least half of the top students are women, and recruitment increasingly reflects our society – in the leadership of universities and institutions.

If I am presented with a long list for appointments from which women are absent I send it back – not because I believe in quotas or reserved positions, but because I suspect that the recruitment process has failed to do enough to find the full range of talent and leadership that I expect to be able to appoint from.

The ‘Science and innovation strategy’, which we published before Christmas, is a piece of work that I am very proud of.

A government strategy, not just a BIS strategy, signed by the Chancellor as well as myself and the Business Secretary, written in close collaboration with colleagues across government, it firmly establishes science and innovation in the government’s agenda.

And for anyone that frets about future policy, the title makes it explicit: it is called ‘Science and innovation: our plan for growth’.

It identifies – because you have identified – the challenges to respond to and to shape over the next decade – maintain and enhancing excellence; fostering and not impeding collaboration between institutions, disciplines, sectors and countries; being agile enough to respond with energy and flexibility to the new opportunities that we may not even be aware of today, but which are sure to present themselves; recognising the importance of place – the clusters that can reinforce excellence, the local leadership that can bring further resources and influence to universities, and an openness to an increasingly interested public here and around the world.

Let me end with my thanks.

Universities are institutions of people, and our universities could not be as good as they are without the devotion and wisdom and effort of the people who work in them, and - as in the case of HEFCE , and all of the other bodies concerned with HE, including my officials in support of them.

The last few years have been tumultuous for everyone in this hall.

But from it we can see that our universities have emerged as a force in the life of the nation that has:

never been greater
never been more alive
never been more able to transform peoples’ lives and our world, than they – which is to say, you personally – do now

We can approach the future with confidence.

Speech: Driverless vehicles: the uses and benefits

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 13:19:13 +0000

Good morning everyone.

It’s a real pleasure to join you today (22 October 2014) at Thatcham.

My thanks to David and the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety for inviting me and for all the great work they do.

I’d also like to thank Peter Shaw and his team here for such a warm welcome, and for showing me the first rate facilities you have here.

We are here to discuss something that has the potential to revolutionise transport – and particularly road transport – in our modern world.

It’s a revolution that for many feels a bit sci-fi.

So it’s been fascinating to discover today that the technology is not wholly new.

In fact, it’s mostly an adaptation of familiar systems drivers use every day.

Like anti-lock braking, adaptive cruise control, automated parking and lane warning.

Less a revolution, and more of an evolution.

Today’s vehicles are so technically advanced that there is the real prospect that driverless cars could be on our roads in a relatively short amount of time.

But what makes this so intriguing isn’t just the technical challenge.

It’s the cultural challenge.

The idea of tech-enabled driving feels a bit weird.

We are all so used to being masters –or mistresses –of the road. Invincible. Always right.

Even though it’s our shortcomings that lead to most accidents.

Getting people to embrace and trust something that at first may feel alien.

But if and when it is adopted, this evolution has the power to profoundly change our lives.

Not just making driving safer and easier.

But reducing congestion.

Making people more productive.

And therefore helping boost our economy too.

So for me, driverless vehicles aren’t just a challenge for engineers.

They’re also a challenge for us politicians.

A challenge for us all to solve.

And that’s something I find very exciting indeed.

And as a transport minister, I can certainly see the technological benefits for other travel modes.

Better capacity optimisation and improved safety are key in other areas too – like railways.

The rail industry has already made great leaps providing more capacity through its ‘digital railway’ programme by making better use of existing trains and infrastructure.

This initiative draws from experience in aviation where digital air traffic management has delivered big increases in capacity without building more runways.

Train signalling is the single biggest constraint on rail network capacity.

It controls train movements, but only allows one train to be on any one section of track at a given point in time.

This means there’s lots of space between each train.

By applying digital technologies to railways it is possible to allow trains to run safely closer together and so delivering greater capacity.

And I also see a future where driverless buses provide better and more frequent services.

A major component of rural transport is the cost of the driver - and so a truly driverless bus could transform rural public transport in the future.

I understand that one of the country’s major bus companies is already interested in driverless buses.

Once we have resolved any regulatory issues that the department’s current review might highlight, this could be just the initiative to get the first driverless bus on the road.

But it’s driverless cars and commercial vehicles where the biggest gains will be delivered.

Driverless – or even highly automated – cars and vans can deliver improved safety; improved emissions, reduced noise; optimal usage of road capacity and better use of the scarcest commodities of all these days.

Time – and attention.

Driver/human error is reported to account for over 90% of traffic incidents, and so it is clear that driverless cars will make a huge difference.

Using the technology to manage traffic flows on trunk roads will smooth traffic flows and reduce the stop/start of congestion, which will, in turn, reduce emissions and improve fuel consumption.

Building new roads to cope with increased capacity is very expensive and is slow to deliver, but this technology can deliver a solution.

And there are great– social – benefits.

The advantages of driver –assisting technology for disabled people or those with poor eyesight are clear.

I saw a Google video showing a man who was reported to have lost 95% of his vision driving a Google-car.

Let’s just imagine the life changing opportunity then of a driverless car not just for blind and partially sighted people, but for all in our community.

It will be truly transformational.

What about the challenge for time poor mothers with school runs to do?

Driver assisting technology could open up new windows for productivity in jammed days.

I had the opportunity earlier to be driven in some of the demonstration vehicles available today.

They are fantastic.

But I can also understand that some drivers will be – at the very least - unsure of them.

I know that manufacturers will be doing their best to reassure customers and to provide the right type of guidance.

Many manufacturers such as BMW, Audi, Nissan, Ford and Jaguar Land Rover are looking to develop models with autonomous functions.

Nissan, for example, is currently working with the Oxford Mobile Robitics Group project at Oxford University, which is using a modified Nissan Leaf Electric Vehicle fitted with prototype navigation equipment, and are hoping to develop a low cost autonomous navigation system for fitment into next generation vehicles.

But what can government do?

We have a number of plans.

We have set up a trial programme with our colleagues from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills that will demonstrate these driverless vehicles in towns and cities.

In July a £10 million fund was launched for collaborative research and development projects to look at how driverless cars can be integrated into everyday life in the UK.

This competition is being managed and run by Innovate-UK and has the potential to support up to 3 projects starting on 1 January 2015.

The projects are to be industry led, with a local authority partner, and feature driverless-type capability in an urban environment.

They will last between 18 and 36 months - and we hope to announce the competition winners next month.

I hope the trials in our cities and towns will put us at the forefront of this transformational technology and open up new opportunities for our economy.

Separately, the Department for Transport is leading a review of the relevant regulation and legislation to ensure there is a clear and appropriate regime for the testing of driverless cars in the UK, whilst also ensuring public safety.

The review will establish what issues must be addressed to enable the testing of such technology on UK roads whilst maintaining existing high levels of road user safety.

It will cover where there is an individual in the vehicle who is qualified and capable of taking control of the car. I must add that this individual will be sitting in the conventional driving position.

The review will also look further ahead to the implications of potential use of fully autonomous vehicles.

The Department for Transport published the terms of reference and a discussion document seeking views on the 4 August 2014. The closing date for which was 19 September. The department is currently reviewing the responses received and will publish its report by the end of 2014.

We are also looking at ‘platooning’ of heavy goods vehicles on the trunk road network. I am sure you will know that platooning is the electronic coupling of vehicles to run in close formation. By allowing vehicles to run closer together, the government recognises the potential fuel and carbon savings, reduced congestion by creating more efficient use of the network, and reduced road casualties by eliminating driver error from accidents.

The department has recently concluded a feasibility study of platooning on the UK trunk road network using vehicles with partial automation, but with a driver in each vehicle. I recently approved the next phase of research and know that work will be getting underway in 2015.

So 2015 could be the year of the driverless or highly automated car and truck in the UK.

I have spoken about the technology and the opportunity and benefits for the UK, but the trials will also provide a great learning opportunity.

Driverless technology is the future. We can’t avoid it and I don’t want us to: I want the UK to learn as much as we can and as quickly as we can. And that includes understanding how these vehicles interact with society and other road users.

I can announce today that I have asked my officials to implement alongside the trials, a study of driver and road user behaviour. I do believe this is important as a means to reassure the public that we are careful of the risk, but also recognising the need for progress.

I wanted also to mention, and you won’t be surprised to hear, that the UK is very good at road safety. We have one of the best records and the figures for 2013 released a few weeks ago showed again the lowest levels of fatal road casualties (1713) since records began in 1926.

I want the introduction of these new technologies to continue our record breaking achievement for the decades to come, and I am sure you all share that ambition.

Today has been absolutely fascinating.

And I thank everyone who has helped stage such a successful event.

It has certainly given me a huge amount to think about – and I’ll be sharing what I’ve learnt with my ministerial colleagues.

As I said at the start, this is a challenge for all of us.

But it’s also a challenge that everyone will benefit from.

So I look forward to working with you in the future, to turn this developing technology into real change on our transport network.

Thank you.

Speech: Supporting Britain's public sector talent

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:07:00 +0000

Before I say anything else, I want to start with a thank you. The work you and other public sector workers do is hard. You don’t do it because you want an easy life. You don’t do it because it’s a cushy job. You do it because, when you get home at the end of the day, you want to know you’ve made a difference. And you have.

Read New support for public sector workers for a summary of the measures announced.

You can’t get more at the sharp end than being the social worker trying to protect a child at risk of violence or abuse; the fire fighter running into a burning building when everyone else is running out; the nurse, doctor or paramedic battling to save the life of someone who’s barely holding on; the teacher seizing on a spark of interest in a class of boisterous teenagers; the policy expert figuring out how we keep the lights on for the next hundred years; the council worker dedicated to saving their local high street or securing essential local services; the probation and prison officers patiently working to turn the life around of someone who has only ever known a life of crime or drug addiction.

This is just a snapshot of the incredible things that you and the rest of Britain’s 5 million public sector workers do every day. For that, you deserve our enduring respect and gratitude. Whatever the pressures, no matter how hard the challenges, you keep our country going and I want to thank you on behalf of myself, my party and the government.

Your contribution is even more remarkable given that – over the last 4 years, in the wake of the biggest financial crisis in living memory, with our public services having to absorb significant spending cuts – every public service has had to do more with less.

In coalition, we’ve had to take difficult decisions on pay and pensions as we deal with the deficit – because there is nothing remotely fair or public spirited about saddling our children and grandchildren with those debts.

You’ve had to make personal sacrifices – to keep more of your colleagues in work and protect essential services for those who need them most.

As a result of those decisions, those sacrifices, our country is back on track. Our country is growing again. More people are in work than ever before.

And while a lot of families are still feeling the squeeze, we are finally through the fire. Up and down the country, people can once again look to their future with hope.

Securing the future of Britain’s public services

The question is: what next? The job’s not done. We’ve still got a way to go to pay down the deficit and, if the last 5 years were about securing Britain’s recovery, the next 5 years must be about moving from a period of rescue to a period of renewal. How do we learn to live within our means while providing people with the innovative and world class public services they deserve?

That is one of the central questions all political parties must answer at the next general election, and each one of the UK’s main political parties has a different response.

[Political content removed]

I believe in sound public finances supporting strong public services. I recognise that to build a stable, more balanced economy and a fairer society in Britain, we need both our public sector and private sector to thrive together, and we see you – Britain’s public servants – as our partners in this.

Without growing businesses and the taxes we pay, we don’t have the money to invest in good hospitals and schools. Without educated children and healthy adults, there wouldn’t be growing businesses.

[Political content removed]

And while I would love to come here today to tell you this means immediate relief from the pressure you’ve been under on pay, you know as well as I do, it simply isn’t possible yet.

That is why I think IPSA (Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority) should not grant a pay rise to MPs while everyone else in the public sector has their pay rises restricted and I have told them so.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel: once the deficit is gone and public spending is growing, my party will be able to deliver a better financial deal for all those who work in our public services.

In the meantime, I believe there are concrete steps we can take now as we finish that journey and build some of the best, most resilient and innovative public services in the world. I’m talking about, first, cutting unnecessary red tape to help reduce your workloads; second, giving you more support to deal with the particular stresses and strains that your roles bring; and, finally, ensuring the public sector offers you modern, progressive workplaces.

Workload Challenge for teachers

Firstly, every time I speak to a teacher, nurse, social worker, Jobcentre Plus manager, police officer or council worker one issue comes up again and again: their battle with bureaucracy.

Take teaching. Some people are still under the misguided impression that it’s a profession built around short days and long holidays. But talk to a teacher and they’ll tell you about their working week of 50 hours or more. They’ll also tell you how much of this time they feel is wasted on unnecessary processes, box ticking and form filling.

We’re talking about hours spent struggling to stay on top of piles of incident reports, over-detailed lesson plan templates, health and safety forms, departmental updates, training requests and so on that threaten to engulf them every week. Not to mention the reams of additional evidence which teachers pull together because of a long-held belief that Ofsted inspectors want to see everything written down.

Some of this work is unavoidable. Every school needs to ensure the safety of its pupils and staff and maintain the highest standards possible. But should you really have to fill in multiple risk assessment forms for every school trip when just one form would be better?

Ask any teacher and they’ll give you at least 2 more examples like that: whether it’s having to highlight their lesson plans in five different colours or inputting every pupil’s marks into countless different spreadsheets in countless different ways at regular points in the year.

I believe it’s time for us to stop that runaway train of bureaucracy in its tracks, giving our teachers more time to do what they do best: creating and planning the best possible lessons and experiences for our children. In government, we’ve already done this for businesses: freeing up money and resources for millions of companies.

We want to do the same for the public sector – starting with teachers. This is part of the wider work being done by Nicky Morgan and David Laws to tackle the issue of workload across the teaching profession, following talks with trade unions.

It has already produced a new myth busting document from Ofsted, which clarifies what’s expected of teachers for school inspections.

And, today, I’m pleased to announce with Nicky Morgan, the Secretary of State for Education, the launch of our new Workload Challenge for teachers.

We’re asking teachers across the country to take a long hard look at how they spend their working day and what pointless processes and paperwork they think should be cut or scrapped altogether.

We want you to then send us your ideas via the Workload Challenge page available on the TES website.

In the New Year, a panel led by teachers and educators will scrutinise the best ideas, then work with Ofsted, the teaching unions and other leading education stakeholders to put them into action starting early next year.

If we can show this pilot working in education, I want to get it rolled out as soon as possible to all our other services too.

At the same time as our challenge is running, we’ve also got teams going into 30 schools to look in more detail at what’s happening on the ground.

Based on the teams’ findings, we’ll continue to work with a cross-section of schools and the teaching unions to highlight best practice and develop tips and tools every school can use to tackle unnecessary workload, whilst also maintaining the highest standards of teaching and management.

Frontline mental health support

Secondly, as well as easing your workloads where we can, I want to do more to help you deal with the specific pressures and demands that come with your different roles.

Many of you choose to work in the public sector because, when you see someone in trouble or in need of support, you want to step in and help. Yet being that person day in and day out – dealing with people who are often disengaged, frustrated, angry or at risk of hurting themselves or other people – can take its toll.

These kinds of pressures are especially acute for Britain’s emergency service workers. Our ambulance workers, paramedics, firemen, police, the Coastguard all get thrown in to incredibly stressful and harrowing situations such as road accidents, suicides, the loss of a young child, and a terrorist attack.

When calls like these come, they need to be ready and, when the shift ends, they go home to their families and try to be a good partner, friend, mum or dad. But if there’s no way of dealing with the day’s challenges, the pressure can become too much – leading to mental health issues.

In the most extreme circumstances, this causes burn out and people leaving the job altogether. In discussions with the government, workers from across our blue-light services have told us that they want more support to prevent and deal with these mental and emotional demands.

Throughout this coalition, I’ve fought for the resources to secure equal treatment for mental health with physical health. In the emergency services, you’re given protective gloves, masks, stab vests, fire fighting kit etc, as well procedures to follow to keep you physically safe. I want to give you that same high standard of protection for your mental health.

That is why I’ve asked the mental health organisation Mind to work with our emergency services personnel to develop and trial a new package of Frontline Mental Health support.

This will include practical tools emergency service workers can use to cope with the strain of working relentlessly busy shifts, answering traumatic call outs, helping grieving relatives and keeping the public safe, healthy and well.

We know this kind of support has already had a huge impact in other countries and services, for example the US Army – where, since 2008, resilience training has helped to reduce rates of anxiety and depression amongst over 1 million soldiers. But it’s not been tried and tested in the UK on this scale before.

We aim to start this pilot in the spring and roll it out across our emergency services more widely as soon as we can.

Mind are already working with employers to raise awareness of mental health problems and reduce stigma, through their Time to Change programme, and I would urge those public sector bodies still to sign up to Time to Change to do so now.

Modern, engaging workplaces

Finally, I recognise that you can’t get the best public services without the best people, and every day we’re competing with the private sector for your talent and skills.

To ensure you stick with us, we need our public services to be offering some of the best places to work in the UK. This means modern, engaging workplaces which look beyond just qualifications to see your potential; give you the chance to progress as far as your talents and ambition can take you; and help you strike that balance between managing the demands of your job and home – whether that’s caring for a sick relative, bringing up children or just leading a more balanced life.

When this government started, for too many young people, it was still a case of who you know not what you know that secured your access to valuable work experience or internship opportunities in the civil service.

Since 2010, we’ve focused hard on levelling that playing field for all young people. This includes establishing 2 new work experience programmes, which give school and college students a chance to see for themselves what working in government is like and gain vital professional experience and skills.

We’ve stopped the informal internships arrangements in government which only gave a leg up to those with insider contacts: ensuring that all of our civil service internship places are advertised widely and openly.

In addition, we’ve expanded the number of places available on our Summer Diversity Internship scheme – which targets young people from ethnic minorities or poorer backgrounds – from 175 to 300.

We’ve also created our new fast-track apprenticeship scheme. As you know, for years, the civil service has recruited its future leaders through the tried and tested route of the Graduate Fast-Stream Scheme. But university isn’t for everyone. Many talented young people want to earn while they learn and, if we’re serious about recruiting the brightest and best out there, we need to ensure they get a shot at the top jobs too.

Based on this scheme’s early success, we’ve already doubled the number of fast-track apprenticeship places available in the civil service from 100 to 200 – with plans to double them again to 400 by 2016.

In the coming months, I want to see the scale and reach of these schemes – along with those you’re part of – grow right across our public services. They’ve got to, if we want to secure a diverse public sector built on merit, equipped to challenge outdated thinking, drive innovation and deliver better public services.

Shared Parental Leave

For me, it’s critical that people who choose to work in the public sector know that they’re working in modern, progressive workplaces. That is why I think it’s also important we do more to support public sector workers balancing the demands of modern life.

As you know, from April next year, under our new shared parental leave arrangements, if you’re a new mum who wants to return to work before your 12 months of maternity leave is up, or go back to work for a particular project, you can without losing out.

Your partner will be entitled to use your remaining parental leave and pay, if that’s what you both want. You can even – as parents – take chunks of time off together.

It’s up to individual employers to decide the extra pay and support they can give to their employees during this shared parental leave period. Ideally, I want to see every public sector organisation doing what they can to help their employees take full advantage of these new rules.

I pushed for the introduction of shared parental leave in the first place, because we fundamentally believe it’s time for us to sweep away the outdated regulations and prejudices which still limit the choices of too many people in this country. Evidence shows promoting flexible working patterns like this can help boost employee productivity, loyalty and retention.

To help get that revolution started in the public sector, working with Francis Maude and the Cabinet Office, I’ve been pushing hard for radical reforms to the way in which the civil service pays and supports its staff after their children are born.

So, I’m pleased to confirm that, from April 2015, the civil service will be offering equal parental pay and support to all its employees – male and female. As result, it will no longer just be new mums working in the civil service who can take maternity leave at full pay. Dads will also be able to benefit from enhanced pay for shared parental leave, if both parents choose to carve up their time between them.

This means more fathers will be able to afford to take time off to spend caring for their new born children. More widely, I want to see this change blaze a trail for other public and private sector organisations to follow – making this option the norm for more working families and increasing the opportunities available to both sexes to earn and care across our society.

And this shouldn’t just be about parents. With an ageing population, there are increasing numbers of people living with long-term medical conditions and receiving care from their family members.

[Political content removed]

This builds on our successful work in government to extend the right to flexible working to everyone, and again I’d like to see more organisations across the public sector and private sector offering more flexible working arrangements to their employees to help family carers juggle their commitments at work and home and stay healthy themselves.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the jobs you do aren’t easy. They’re not for the faint hearted, but you do them because you want to make a difference. I hear that in every job centre, hospital, school, police station, prison and public sector office I visit.

Britain just wouldn’t work without you. That’s why I believe it’s so critical to give you the professional opportunities and support you need to keep doing your jobs well.

This is my commitment and that of my party to you: we’ll keep doing what we can to ensure our government empowers, values and listens to you more.

Only, together, working as partners, can we finish the job we’ve started and finish it fairly: building the stronger economy and fairer society Britain needs to succeed.

Thank you.

Speech: Improving the UK's industrial future

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 14:42:37 +0000

Can I thank you for what you said. This is a really great positive occasion. Something we can celebrate. There aren’t many occasions when government and business is entirely on the same page and in agreement and indeed across the business sector. And it’s even more unusual when you get political parties agreeing. We just had several weeks of tribal warfare at our party conferences but actually this is something we agree about and when I launched this at the beginning of the government it was with the support of my Conservative colleagues. So we have a broad support for an approach, which we haven’t had in this country for many years – decades.

I think there are 2 really very simple ideas at the heart of this.

One is that there are major areas of policy where government and business have to work together and of course, in many respects, business does its own thing and the best role for government is to get out of the way. But there are some respects in which we have to work together. One is skill development. Another is science and innovation. Another is on government procurement – making sure that it is strategic in the way that it operates and as we continue to be with the legacy of the banking crisis, there is common interest in making sure that we get flows of finance, particularly to the SME sector. So there are areas where we have to work on a partnership basis.

And the other big idea is long term thinking. I have now been in Parliament for quite a long time, but I still haven’t quite got over my shock when I came out of a big company in the oil and gas sector - where we did 20 year planning - and entering the political world - where of course we regard 5 years as heroically long term. Of course it isn’t just the politicians you know – asset managers, the media think in terms of hours let alone years so there are enormous pressures to think short term. But for many of the companies represented in this room we have to think long term. Long beyond the political cycle and the purpose of an Industrial Strategy is to do that. It’s to get business and government working together and to do within the long term time frame.

One of the innovative elements in the approach we have adopted is to think in terms of sectors – initially there was a lot of tut tutting about this – do we really have to pick winners and so on. But actually it became perfectly natural to concentrate attention on certain sectors of the economy that were organised in that way. We had the Automotive Council, we had already collaborative relations in aerospace and we have extended that approach to the energy supply chains and to others. And this is predominantly about manufacturing but it’s not only. Some of the most successful bits of the Industrial Strategy relate for example to the creative industries or to professional services or to education – particularly higher education seen as an export industry. And others have grown up spontaneously. It became obvious to the people who were operating in the railway sector that a lot was happening – a lot of investment was taking place and for goodness sake let’s try and deal with this in a more strategic way and so the railway income sector as come together in very much an industrial strategy manner. And the same thing has happened in chemicals that were hitherto rather fragmented and if the foundation industries that Katja described feel somewhat beleaguered as they are because of cost pressures then it would be absolutely right and sensible that we work with them in a similar way.

So that’s the basic philosophy. I think as a result of it, we have some good concrete results. Real collaborations happening – they are not just words. If you take the most obvious and advanced of them, the aerospace sector has produced this £2 billion joint 50:50 government/private sector collaboration to develop the next generation of R and D in the industry. We shouldn’t underestimate this. I came into government and sat down with the industry shortly afterwards and they said look you know your R and D in the aerospace sector is steadily declining. There is no way that the UK is going to retain its position as the number 2 aerospace country in the world – you’re sliding down the scale, you’ve got to do something about it. And it’s got to involve a long term commitment. So we now have a 10 year commitment, joint by both sectors, in order to strengthen our position in engines and wings in the longer term.

The same thing has happened in the automobile industry – there are people in this room like me who are long enough to remember when the car industry was a joke, something we were embarrassed about. It’s now one of our most successful industries – an enormous amount of capital is now being invested not just by the OEMs but further through the supply chain. I think £6 to £8 billion in the last few years and again there are the big high profile projects which we all know about like at Land Rover, the big investment in Ford (I’m going to Dagenham later this morning with the Prime Minister with a big new engine project). The smaller things which are not on the radar – I’ve just come back from India where I met an Indian car company – high quality car compenents company – AMTEC which is investing in Kidderminster to create 500 new jobs in a foundry supporting the new Wolverhampton engine plant. So these are real things and lying behind it is a joint project between government and the industry – the Advanced Propulsion Project, which is creating the next generation power train based on low carbon technology. And there are similar things happening in bioscience, in the energy supply chains - for example, the Siemens project for turbine development on Humberside is very much linked into this strategic approach that I’ve described to you.

Let me just briefly review some of the ways in which we are trying to take forward – what I call - public private partnership writ large. First of all we recognise that training skills is an absolutely massive issue. Wherever I go now I am told by companies that skill shortage is probably the most important single break on their expansion and it does involve a multi-faceted approach. It involves fairly toxic issues like immigration on which I think Katja has said the right things. But what we are trying to do is to help business to develop through expansion of the apprenticeship programme. I think one of the first big decisions I took in government when we had to make big cuts right from the beginning – we’ve cut our department by 25% - but despite that to invest more in apprenticeship training.

We’ve now got 2 million who will have gone through schemes under this government and we’re now trying to focus it much more on advanced higher apprenticeships where the real skill bottlenecks are and to make it much more ‘employer led’ and we have – what we call – an Employer Ownership scheme and I’m able to announce a package of funding for 6 companies in the car supply chain. I’ve got the names of the companies here – Benteler, Brose, Getrag, Gestamp, Nifco and Unipres – there are the sort of tier 2 companies which are in danger of losing their skilled workers because of being cannibalised within the industry but this will help to reinforce their skill development.

So skills is one area which we are trying to deal with through a big expansion of apprenticeships, through the focus on STEM – which Katja referred to. I absolutely endorse what she said about the importance of getting women into engineering both through apprenticeships and graduate level. It’s a fact that we shouldn’t be proud of as a country - that of all the 28 countries in the European Union we are the worst in terms of women in engineering and we’ve really got to combat that. So skill training is one area. The second is helping supply chain development. There is a lot of funding issues around some of the smaller tier 2 companies still can’t get credit from the banks and we’ve launched a substantial programme – I think £245 million so far – helping to finance supply chain capital. We think in the process we may have saved or generated something in the order of 15,000 jobs and that’s an on-going programme.

Thirdly, and again both Mark and Katja referred to it is Britain’s performance in innovation and R and D . We are in danger of slipping down the international leagues table and we have tried to arrest that by making this very strong commitment to the science budget, which has been ring-fenced. And also by setting up the chain of Catapult Centres, which I think has been a great success - loosely based on the German Franhoffer model but adapted very much to British conditions - in which advanced manufacturing did a lot of the pioneering work. That has been expanded and later this year we will have 2 more centres rolled out – we’ve now got 7, the next will be on energy storage and stratified or crystallised medicine.

I think fourthly finance. The British Business Bank, which you don’t see on the high street but is basically a sort of virtual bank which is putting funding into new sources of business finance, peer to peer lending, crowd funding platforms, supporting some of the new banks that are coming through the system and which are absolutely crucial to the smaller companies, which cannot raise either loan or equity financing by conventional means.

Fifth, recognising the particular issues around energy intensive industries. We do realise a lot of those industries – the foundation industries – are under the cosh because they are competing on price. Energy is relatively expensive. We have been trying to address through a compensation mechanism, which we have now developed – cash is being paid out but no doubt we will be told that a great deal more should be done.

So we have a whole series of policy initiatives in those areas. I’d just like to conclude by acknowledging the point which Katja made in her introduction. Which is how do we try to create for the business community as much certainty and policy stability as possible because, you know, there is risk out there. Many of you are struggling with exchange rate issues – the pound is in danger of getting overvalued again. Not a great deal that government can or should do about that. We can’t manipulate exchange rates but it’s a risk that business is running if you’re in international trade. There is issues around the Eurozone growth where there are some rather pessimistic predictions coming out. Now those are business risks which you’ve got to live with in in any event but what we need to try to ensure is that gratuitous risk creation isn’t being generated by government. We’ve just narrowly avoided difficulty in relation to Scotland. A good outcome but it created a period of hiatus for a lot of companies. We’ve now got similar risk which we really must minimise about doubts created over our membership of the European Single Market and there are perfectly good challenges, which you put to us about lack of clarity or consistency in relation to infrastructure projects. We do recognise we need to do better on that front.

But can I thank you all for coming. Thanks to CBI and GE and I look forward to getting feedback and questions from you.

Consultation outcome: Future development of loans in further education

Thu, 19 Jun 2014 10:30:00 +0000

Updated: Government response published.

We gathered views on proposals for a further expansion of loans in the further education sector. The proposed expansion aims to:

provide access to learning for the widest possible group of people
simplify the current funding system, so it is easy to understand, and learners have greater control over their learning choices
strengthen incentives for learners engaging in training and skills development
widen access and strengthen alignment with higher education funding

We also gathered feedback on how the current system is working and ideas for improving loans in further education more generally.

We are taking the time necessary to fully analyse a diverse set of responses to our recent consultation. We will ensure we make decisions in the context of wider government objectives. The Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) will publish its response early in the new year.